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Wired Today: Read This

Take the time/Do the work > Perhaps none of this is surprising—data breach after data privacy scandal have spotlighted just how intimately private companies track Americans’ daily lives. However much these companies wish to normalize their surveillance, down to the exact sidewalk you stand on or restaurant you sit in, we can’t forget that data brokers selling this location data threaten civil rights, national security, and democracy.

On top of all this, foreign intelligence or security organizations could buy up data broker data, with virtually no restrictions, to conduct intelligence operations or identify the real-time locations of diplomats, government, or military personnel. (Think of how FitBit data exposed the real-time locations of service members on military bases—except where a foreign organization can buy the data, legally, directly from an American data broker.) All of this harms national security, as companies aggregate and sell highly sensitive data on US individuals with no public visibility into what kind of vetting, if any, is done of potential buyers.

The only way to mitigate these companies’ threat to democracy—through their extraordinary and unchecked surveillance power—is regulation. Congress must integrate the data brokerage ecosystem into a strong federal privacy law, restricting the constant buying and selling of Americans’ sensitive data

These firms could track whether you've visited your therapist's office or your ex's house. And without regulation, they're a threat to democracy

Data Brokers Know Where You Are—and Want to Sell That Intel

Read more > https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-data-brokers-know-where-you-are-and-want-to-sell-that-intel/

From The Daily Beast: Extreme Right Lawmaker May Have Violated Financial Disclosure Laws

Friendly Reminder to Readers of this blog: “Voters have a right to know what financial interests their elected officials are beholden to.”

Seems like one of Trump's latest converts recruited in Colorado to get endorsed for election to Congress, "Loud-Mouth Lauren", who usually yells her conservative talking-points during staged events for Turning Point USA and other far-right 'alternative news' doesn't have many comments to make after a reporter looked at some questionable financial disclosures.

Lauren Boebert May Have Violated Financial Disclosure Laws

DRILL

Roger Sollenberger

The Daily Beast

"Business records appear to connect Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to her husband’s energy consulting company. And Boebert never disclosed the income

 

Insert Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) appears to have failed to properly disclose the true source of nearly $1 million her husband made in the energy sector, in possible violation of House Ethics rules. And even worse: Some of that money appears to have been paid through a company connected directly to Boebert herself. . .According to new financial disclosures, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s husband, Jayson Boebert, made $478,386 in 2020 and $460,601 in 2019 for “consulting services” he provided to a company called Terra Energy Productions, AP reported last week. (That name appears to be an error, with the intended company being Houston-based Terra Energy Partners.) A Terra Energy Partners representative confirmed to The Daily Beast on Friday that Jayson Boebert was a contracted shift worker, but was not paid directly. Instead, he was paid through a company called Boebert Consulting. . .

But while Boebert Consulting doesn’t appear in Lauren Boebert’s recent filing, it is listed on the financial forms Boebert filed in January 2020 as a congressional candidate, as “self-emp. income” for “spouse.” The income amount is not listed, and not required by law. 

Asked Wednesday to explain her husband’s consulting income source, a Boebert spokesperson told the AP, “Mr. Boebert has worked in energy production for 18 years and has had Boebert Consulting since 2012.”

But the far-right Republican lawmaker may have a problem.

> Colorado records show that Lauren Boebert’s company, “JLB903 LLC,” took over as Boebert Consulting’s registered agent in 2018, according to a conversion document.

> The company temporarily reverted back to Jayson in December 2018, but fell under Boebert’s LLC again, according to its 2019 fiscal year report, which Boebert personally filed. The listing hasn’t changed since, according to documents on the Colorado secretary of state’s website.

> The report for fiscal year 2019 was filed in April 2020, three months after Boebert submitted her candidate financial disclosure showing her husband earned income through Boebert Consulting.

> Again, however, that disclosure does not list JBL903 LLC, and Boebert’s recent filing does not list either company.

> Neither Boebert Consulting nor JLB903 LLC has filed paperwork since April 2020, according to a business database maintained by the Colorado secretary of state. A registered agent search of Jayson Boebert’s name, including alternate spellings, also returns no results.

Together, the filings indicate that between 2019 and 2020, nearly $1 million passed from Terra Energy to Boebert’s husband, some of it apparently through companies connected to Boebert, which she never reported—one of which she never disclosed at all. . .

 

Kedric Payne, senior counsel and director of ethics for the Campaign Legal Center, told The Daily Beast that members are required to disclose all ownership interests and other corporate connections.

“The disclosure laws require lawmakers to reveal the source of all earned income, ownership interests, and certain affiliations with LLCs. Rep. Boebert’s reports raise red flags regarding her compliance with the law,” Payne said. “Voters have a right to know what financial interests their elected officials are beholden to.”

 

Here It’s unclear whether the companies have been licensed to do business in the state. JBL903 LLC, despite still being listed as the registered agent for Boebert Consulting, has been delinquent since June 2019, according to Colorado state records. And in June of this year, Boebert Consulting went the same way, listed by the Colorado secretary of state as delinquent for failing to file its periodic report. Delinquent corporations are not authorized to do business in the state, though they may file to “cure” their delinquency and resume operations.

The new information also raises questions about personal conflicts of interest between Boebert, who sits on the House Committee on Natural Resources, and the energy industry she’s charged with regulating.

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that earlier this month, an affiliate of Terra Energy Partners—the company which contracts Jayson Boebert’s services—requested immediate approval from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for 17 new gas wells near Boebert’s hometown of Rifle, Colorado. . .

In February, Boebert introduced legislation to block executive moratoriums on oil and gas drilling leases on public land, which President Joe Biden had enacted weeks prior. (A federal judge struck down that executive order in June.)

“While Joe Biden continues to pander to campaign donors and extremist environmentalists, I’ll continue to fight for jobs and the people of Colorado’s Third District,” Boebert said in announcing her bill.

READ MORE >

NASA Goes Big Brother

Decennial Re-Districting (Digital GerryMandering): Redistricting Consulting Firms > Re-Drawing Electoral Maps

Map-Drawing technology is made advanced than ten years ago. Modern technology allows electoral mapmakers to not only draw thousands of maps, but also create maps look fair but are actually severe gerrymanders that rig elections for one party.

Illustration below: Guardian Design.

Those are some words of caution for what is supposed-to-be for all appearances 'non-partisan".

It's easier than ever to carve U.S. electoral districts to one party's benefit -- but it's also easier

To expose the practice.

‘From dark art to dark science’: the evolution of digital gerrymandering

Yes the software - and the data - lets you see and imagine different alternatives to set certain parameters to redraw the district geographic boundaries.  

Here in Mesa in four months the final maps must be approved by the Mesa Council. Before that deadline, five members were nominated on the city's Redistricting Commission, a redistricting consultant was hired in a $50,000 contract, and those members were trained.

(Please see earlier posts on this blog for more details)

Every 10 years, when mapmakers sit down to draw district lines, they take on a God-like role, grouping tiny census blocks – the smallest unit of geography the Census Bureau defines – into different districts.

They’re looking not just at hard demographic information like age, sex, race and ethnicity and income level, the redistricting consultants and mapmakers are obliged to consider something vague called 'Communities of Interest'.

The ease with which mapmakers can move around pieces of the puzzle in creating a map now allows them to see more variety, tweak more and make their maps more and more precise.

 Bob Walters, a systems manager for the Rose Institute, training Washington state house and senate staffers on how to use a new computer system to redistrict legislative boundaries in 1981. Photograph: Gary Stewart/AP

In the coming weeks, new technology will play a huge role in mapmakers carve up America’s 435 congressional districts in the US House and even more state and local districts.

> There will also be fewer guardrails in place than ever before; in 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that there were no federal limits on how severely politicians could draw districts to give their party a political advantage, a practice called gerrymandering.

“What used to be a dark art is now a dark science,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Before, you weren’t sure about the data, but now you’re much more certain so you’re able to draw things in ways that can be more aggressive.”

Over the last decade, mathematicians and others have also begun to automate the map-drawing.

> New algorithms allow mapmakers to very quickly generate thousands of sample maps based on whatever criteria they input. They could immediately generate thousands of gerrymandered maps, for example, that give one party a significant advantage while also meeting other neutral redistricting criteria like keeping districts compact and meeting the requirements of the Voting Rights Act. The point isn’t necessarily to use a computer to draw a map, experts say, but to explore the possibilities of what’s possible.

Insert : (1) “That’s a big deal. Sure, there were algorithms 10 years ago, but they were absolute stone age,” said Moon Duchin, a mathematician who leads the MGGG redistricting lab at Tufts University. “You just didn’t have, 10 years ago, good techniques for really seeing a lot of variety and now we do. And that’s a superpower you can use for good or evil.”

(2) “I don’t know how to put this nicely – gerrymandering is not really rocket science,” added Samuel Wang, a Princeton professor who leads the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. “You can be reasonably clever and at the level of an excellent checkers player or a reasonably good board gamer and do a good job of drawing a map that confers partisan advantage.”

EXAMPLE CITED IN THE REPORT IN THE GUARDIAN:

Insert ". . .Duchin and other experts are working to make sure the algorithms are used for good. While the algorithms can be used to generate extreme maps, they can also be used to identify them by generating hundreds or even thousands of possible sample maps according to neutral criteria. Armed with those sample maps, experts say they will be able to more easily see when a map lawmakers are considering is more extreme than what’s expected.

“You can still build extreme maps, maybe even better than ever. But now we kind of have a method to kind of show that they’re extreme,” Duchin said.

The Florida state senator Rene Garcia looks at a map for proposed changes in congressional districts during a January 2012 state senate committee meeting. Photograph: Chris O’Meara/AP

Reformers have already seen how powerful these algorithms can be in fighting gerrymandering.

In 2017, Jowei Chen, a professor at the University of Michigan, used a computer algorithm to draw 1,000 theoretical maps for Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional seats. The algorithm built districts based on “non-partisan, traditional districting criteria”, like keeping county and municipal boundaries intact as well as equalizing populations and keeping districts compact.

Chen also told the algorithm to favor protecting incumbent members of congress. When he compared the 1,000 sample maps to the one Pennsylvania Republicans enacted in 2011, it was clear that the actual map in place was an extreme outlier, far more partisan than if lawmakers were trying to fulfill non-partisan criteria.

When the Pennsylvania supreme court struck down the maps in 2018, the majority pointed to Chen’s analysis as “perhaps the most compelling evidence” the map was so gerrymandered that it violated the state’s constitution. . ."

In 2010, Republicans took advantage of redistricting like they never had before. The party launched a concerted effort, called Project Redmap, to win control of state legislatures and then aggressively drew districts that entrenched Republican control. . .

> While mapmaking has long been done in secret, there’s been an explosion of publicly available, high-quality tools that the public can use to draw districts for free online.

> Watchdog groups have also developed easy-to-use online systems that can quickly score maps to see just how gerrymandered they are.

Duchin, the Tufts mathematician, has developed software that allows ordinary citizens in places like Michigan and Wisconsin to their own sample districts to show lawmakers which parts of the state should be preserved.

“One of the big differences from 10 years ago and especially from 20 years ago is the leveling of the playing field, where anybody can have access to voting data and to scoring software that allows the evaluation of a map for fairness or unfairness,” said Wang, whose groups plans to publicly score maps as they are released.

“That’s a big change in the positive direction in terms of pro-democracy and pro-disclosure.”

Those scoring tools, Wang said, will allow a vigilant public to identify gerrymanders that aren’t obvious to the naked eye and hold lawmakers accountable, Wang said.

“The fact that there’s just armies of nerds out there ready to look at these things, ready to … score things, that’s a real change from 10 years ago,” he said."

 

 

Sunday Night in America 8/22/21 | FOX BREAKING TRUMP'S NEWS August 22 ,21

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