Scum. And there were probably thousands of rescuers who would happily have helped save these dogs, if only the business owners/managers would have bothered.

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Seems that Facfebook gets all the press when it comes to online privacy. But it’s time to put in a bad word for Etsy, too. Now, maybe you don’t hang out at Etsy, which is, after all, an arts & crafts bazaar that may be of limited interest to the techies and political types hereabouts.

But it appears that Etsy might be interested in you, even if you’ve never heard of it.

This week, Etsy members are all getting emails that say (as if speaking to extraordinarily stupid kindergarteners): “Right now it’s hard to find people you know on Etsy, and that’s sad. Well, we’re changing that. We’re making it easy to connect your email address book to Etsy, so we can find people you know who are also members.”

In other words, if you’re in the address book of somebody who has an account at Etsy, they’ll soon be encouraged to upload your name, your address, and whatever other personal data about you they possess in the address book to Etsy. Without your consent. Without even your knowledge.

Whether you receive Etsy spam or not appears to be up to the discretion of the moron who uploaded your information. And once you’ve received Etsy spam at a given email address, you’re graciously “allowed” to opt out of getting any more. But nevertheless, the real bad deed is already done. Etsy will have acquired personal data on (potentially millions of) people who don’t even know they’re being data-mined. And despite all assurances, there’s no telling what Etsy will do with that information. There’s no assurance they’ll safeguard it (and why should they). There’s no telling the ways that the data could be linked with other data to create yet another profile of you and your connections and your activities.

——

I could be wrong in some of my suspicions about Etsy and the worst potential consequences of this grotesque new policy. Details are sketchy. And Etsy isn’t offering any clarifications. This week’s patronizing message and this updated passage in their privacy policy are about the only Clues:

We utilize a contact-importer feature to help you identify people from your email address books who are current members of Etsy and invite any other contact to join Etsy. You may connect directly with your email service provider and import your contacts to Etsy. When you add contacts to your Etsy circle, they will automatically receive an email notification. When you invite contacts to join Etsy, you may preview the email invitation before Etsy generates and sends it. Recipients of invitations may opt out of receiving future invitations via a convenient link located in the invitation email. If you do not want your contacts to be able to find your Etsy username through your email address, you may opt out through your account privacy settings.

Etsy has always been about networking. I have a very small Etsy jewelry store that’s never done well, partly because of timing (I got into jewelry-making just as it peaked and right before the crash of 2008) and partly because I’ve never haunted the Etsy forums, participated in Etsy teams, or created Etsy “circles” — whatever they might be.

But the idea that it’s “sad” that “we” can’t find our friends on Etsy is — as some of the 4,000 messages of protest have pointed out — just plain silly. The thing that’s hard to find is the items you’re looking for. Etsy has a very poor search engine, and one that is so biased toward the newest listings that the only way you can ensure your items will be found is to keep “churning” listings. Which costs money every time you do it.

I’m really impressed with the response of Etsy members. For “arty types” the writers of those protests show a lot of concern for privacy and a lot more regard for customers than Etsy itself is displaying. I’m not impressed at all with Etsy’s response, which runs from nil to a few more bland bits of kindergarten talk.

I was thinking about closing my Etsy store, anyhow. Only a few great buyers have kept it alive since the crash. (Thank you. :-) )When my last items are sold or when the listings expire I’ll close the shop but still create jewelry on commission or for my own enjoyment.

The irony is that, should you want to buy any of that jewelry, you won’t be placing yourself in any greater danger from hackers, spammers, and data-miners than you already are. In fact, if you become a member of Etsy or already are one, you’ll soon be given the option not to let your friends “find” you via their uploaded address books. If you aren’t a member of Etsy, you stand an even greater chance of getting Etsy spam.

But all of us, no matter who we are, might never know which of our “friends” have turned us over to commercial marketers and data miners.

Some of the thousands of Etsy members raging against this new “feature” have questioned whether it’s even legal. In some countries, it may not be. In no country is this a senisble or ethical way to treat people. And on the surface, it appears sneakier than any datamining stunt Facebook has ever pulled.

Somebody — I wish I could remember who — recently said something very sharp. When it comes to dealing with social networking companies — or social networking wannabes like Etsy which have forgotten they’re marketplaces in which participants pay commissions to list and sell tangible goods — we are the product being bought and sold. And increasingly, it seems as if we’re entitled to about as much consideration as a marketer might give to a pair of sox or a package of toilet paper.

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For Egyptians now. Might come in handy for us later. Well, except for that one part.

Sure do hope somebody posts a translation of the whole thing, not just these excerpts.

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• How Egypt switched off the ‘Net. And how Egyptians — and hacktivists the world over — are routing around the damage. (ADDED: And here’s yet another way — thanks to engineers at Google and Twitter.)
• “Anonymous: A net gain for liberty.”
• Dmitry Orlov is interesting and the wording of the headline may be misleading. But why should anyone have to have faith in any human institution? How about confidence, suspicion, contempt, etc. based on performance?

• “What is a gold standard?” Interesting to see the mainstream financial media finally beginning to address the question without immediately tossing out words like “fringe,” “impractical,” “right-wing,” etc.

• Hey, could this be your chance to get an inexpensssssive home?
• Okay, the whole “private screeners” thing was only window-dressing, anyhow. But who knew that the TSA has the authority to decide whether anyone’s allowed to compete with it? Or thinks it does. Only in government. No wonder more smart people are asking this question.
• I don’t make a habit of linking to articles from Alex Jonesland, but if you were the guy in the truck, would you be pleased to know that the the Glorious Fatherland was striving to protect the see-something, say-something hysterics from you? The whole nation is going mad. But then, you knew that, didn’t you?
• Ironclad? T’aint nothin’ ironclad when it comes to privacy protection<;/a> on Facebook.
• Side note and ANYBODY LOOKING FOR A GOOD DOG?: This weekend, for the first time, I actually ran across something useful to do on Facebook — in this case, get in touch with a specialist in deaf dog rescue. First sign I’ve seen of Facebook having a purpose other than exchanging drivel and selling info on users. BTW, if anybody in the NW is interested in adopting a nice, young male pointer/English setter mix who’ll soon be graduating well-trained from a prison-pet partnership program, let me know in the comment section. Deaf dogs can be marvelous pals and are easier than most people imagine. I’ve fostered several and found them a joy.
• Integrity. (NY Times free subscription link.)
• For women only: Naturally Concealed. Cool idea. Biggest problem I can see is that, since it’s made like a bra, it will only last as long as a bra. Not long enough. Still … when so many holsters strive merely to overcome the disadvantages of the armed female body, it’s neat to see one that actually uses our … um, assets. (Tip o’ hat to LD!)
• You go, Bolivians! Another sign that the American empire is slowly losing its influence.

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Despite careful efforts to ensure protection for the truthtellers, David Codrea reports that the ATF is already harrassing the Project Gunwalker whistleblowers. (Thanks to EL for the bad word. And kudos to Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh for their original and continuing reporting on Project Gunwalker.)

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Bitcoin. An anonymous somebody dropped this link into a recent comments sections. Would any of you techies or econ experts out there care to comment on it?

I’ve become so inherently distrustful of new online money systems after watching so many fall (and one fall with my money in it) that I admit I no longer even try to evaluate them. I figure they’ll eventually evaluate themselves via their success or failure in the real world. This one’s … different.

And of course, one day one or more of them will succeed. And change the world. Probably not this one. But someday …

Years ago, I heard libertarian economist Joe Furig (RIP) compare the the Federal Reserve to the Vatican. He said it’ll probably never go away, but eventually it will no longer rule the world and will be nothing more than a minor influence.

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Few days ago, for reasons that escape me, I got curious about the fate of Laissez Faire City. If you’ve been around a while you might remember LFC as a hopeful and apparently well-funded effort to build a libertarian community in Costa Rica. That is, a hopeful, well-funded, and unfortunately badly “mis-mangled” project that died aborning.

Wanting to see if there were any shreds of it remaining, I googled it startpaged it duckduckgoed it and found, sadly though not surprisingly, that it has disappeared without a ripple. The ‘Net that Never Forgets has forgotten it. Even its Wikipedia entry simply redirects to a page on anarchist utopian communities — which then completes the humiliation by not even mentioning it. The scamdog site that once gleefully tracked old, dead, and sometimes criminally misbegotten libertopias is also no more, taken over by a cybersquat operation that offers links to dog medicines, dogs for sale, and dog training.

Right on the first page of the search results, though, was a link to my old Wolfesblog, now kindly archived by Bill St. Clair.

If you’re interested in Laissez Faire City (and it seems nobody is), Patri Friedman has an ancient account that pretty much accords with my slight experience with the project.

But failed libertopias aside (and there’s a mindfield of them littering the recent past), I couldn’t resist clicking through a few weeks of old blog entries made by me and my fellow Wolfesblogistas circa 2003, then clicking through the links I found in those entries.

Lots of links are as dead as Laissez Faire City, of course. But I was amazed at how many are still alive and worth a visit. The scientists of AstroCapella are still making beautiful music about astrophysics despite the RIAA’s hilarously wrongheaded efforts to stop them. My favorite is still the Swift Song, even if it was commissioned by NASA.

Alan Bock still offers his ode to living the principled life.

Lots of good old stuff back there.

The thing that struck me most, though, is what has happened (or not happened) with so many of the beastly privacy threats that were making the news back then. In 2003, I was pretty sure that by now everything we bought would carry an individual RFID tag, and possibly that millions of damnfools would already be lining up for their chip injections. That hasn’t happened. Were we privacy doomsayers just being hysterical back then? Was the threat never that terrible? Or did it not happen because smart, tough people like Katherine Albrecht (and, as Ted Dunlap points out in the comments section, thousands more informed and angry people) fought back?

Other privacy threats … well, who knows? Take DARPA’s lovely [ahem] proposal for LifeLog (and more here) — a program to track every, single e-blip about every, single human being for a lifetime. That’s every email you ever sent, every webpage you ever visited, every report card you got in school, every job evaluation, every cellphone call or text message, every photo ever taken of you, every medical exam, every tax you ever paid, every ticket you ever got, every everything.

Terrible, scary sh*t. So … Was LifeLog among the many “bright” ideas of our SuperSTASI that just went away for lack of initiative or funding? Or are there computers in the Pentagon or deep below Langley whirring our life histories away right this minute? We may never know. Or by the time we find out, the news will earn 20 seconds of infamy followed by yawns. Lord knows enough real privacy threats have burdened us in the meantime.

Anyhow, it was an interesting trip down old bromidic Memory Lane.

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I think it was a book. Might have been a novella. Definitely not a short story.

In any case, it was delightful, but I read it so many years ago that I can’t remember the author or the title. Can you help me find it?

Joel blogging about the mysterious causes of World War I — ultimately tracing back to the personal quirks and insecurities of the so-called leaders — got me started & you’ll see why.

The plot: Aliens crash-land on earth near the beginning of the twentieth century, A crucial part on their ship is damaged (I’ll call it an anti-gravity device, though I don’t recall exactly what it was — definitely something you and I would still consider futuretech).

No way can the part be recreated with the earth technology of that time — not even with the aliens’ greater knowledge. Without the part, they can’t go home. So the aliens, seeing that the planet is already on the cusp of political chaos, come up with a scheme. Everybody knows that wars advance technology, right? So they’ll travel around the world, visiting heads of state, and doing everything they can to provoke the war.

Agitating their way across the globe, they meet with Kaiser Wilhelm — and just by the way cure his withered arm. They meet with Czar Nicholas — and just by the way cure his son’s hemophilia. And so on.

I’d put the rest behind a spoiler tag, but the simple tag I know doesn’t work here and the HTML spoiler codes I’ve found online are more complicated than Obamacare and the rest of the federal tax regulations, combined. But you can probably guess the rest, and I’ll come back later and put it at the bottom of the comments section after others have had their say. (And I do hope somebody will have a say about the title and author of that book.)

Thanks!

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Kitty Antonik Wakfer whacks all of us who say we support WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, but who haven’t cancelled our Amazon and PayPal accounts or cut up our MasterCards and Visas.

She does one very good thing, which is to provide a list of possible payment alternatives — even if many of them haven’t reached the point of sustainability (and may never) and others aren’t really applicable.

But the whole piece also does one very bad thing. It implies that because she has chosen the course of boycotting businesses on behalf of WikiLeaks, others who haven’t are wrongheaded at best, and hypocrites and defeatists at worst. She rips into Lew Rockwell, Wendy McElroy, the Center for a Stateless Society, Rational Review News, and a bunch of others. Never gets around to me. But I felt the barb, anyhow.

I haven’t dumped Amazon or PayPal and I don’t plan to. I love Amazon. Hate PayPal. And yes, my conscience pricks me for not joining the boycott. I like to live by my principles. But the simple, pragmatic point is that I need Amazon and PayPal. The $30 or $40 a month they regularly bring in (more around the holidays) is a big deal to me. The alternatives Wakfer mentions won’t replace them.

When it comes to alternative payment systems, it’s not just the Catch-22 of “they won’t become viable until people use them and people won’t use them until they’re proven viable.” It’s that, one after another, highly promising and highly touted digital money or payment systems have fallen due to mismanagement, flawed concepts, or the federales. (I’ve got $500 or so in precious metals sitting in an e-gold account I’m no longer allowed to access because the feds imposed stupid identity rules on them. Anybody want to figure out how to retrieve that money for me, eh?) Now, I would love to see a business with better customer service and a less cozy relationship with the feds compete wildly successfully with PayPal. But you know what? In this case, I’m not willing to play King Canute against that particular tide. I’ll support WikiLeaks and Manning with my words and my donations and ask others to do the same. But that’s it.

Now, I don’t know Kitty Antonik Wakfer. She may be a terrific human being. I hope she is. Her heart’s in the right place.

But I would ask all the “more pure than thou” freedomistas of the world: Have you walked a few years in my shoes?

Say you’re a libertarian or a free-market anarchist. Surely, you object to paying taxes — especially for wars of aggression or government handouts. Surely you object to having a government ID number. Drivers license? Auto registration? You know darned well those are clear violations of your right to travel freely.

So tell me: Do you care enough about your principles to live without all those things? Do you refuse to file your 1040? Refuse to use an SSN or get government ID? Refuse to make your vehicle “legal” with the government? Refuse to send your kids to public school or to comply with your state’s homeschool curricula requirements? Of course, if you live by your principles on that level, it also means you can’t open a bank account, can’t travel internationally (unless you sneak), can’t hold a regular job. It means every time you drive you’ll be watching for cops and taking alternate routes in an attempt to avoid them. It means the state might come and take your kids away from you. It means you’ll be a refusnik in your own society.

But heck — You believe in living according to principles, right? So what’s the problem? If you can pat yourself on the back for closing your Amazon account and imply that everybody who didn’t follow your lead is a hypocrite, surely you’ll be willing to take your principles all the way, wherever they might lead — to prison or penury … or freedom. Or all of the above.

Ask me how I know.

For 15 years, I increasingly lived according to my principles. I did those hard things. Went without numbers and ID. Became an exile in my own land. Got by with a little help from my friends (and sometimes a lot of help from them). And every one of those friends was less “pure” than I; but they should kick my ass if I ever have enough nerve to damn them for their lack of purity.

It takes all kinds. It literally does: Ghosts, Agitators, Moles, and even the occasional Cockapoo.

I no longer live like that. Got tired. Went broke. Became weary of being an outcast — weary of knowing I’d have to fight through every little tiny thing that others take for granted. I’m older and ready for a little calm and comfort. I don’t regret one minute of trying to live free. I’m glad I did it. But it didn’t make the world freer. And for me, that time is done.

Today I resist taxes by making very little money rather than by saying an in-your-face NO. I showed a passport to travel to Panama last year. I comply with just about all of the little everyday compliances demanded of modern American serfs (though living in a small town, there are blessedly few such demands). I contemplate becoming a Cockapoo, though I haven’t yet brought myself to that point and may never. Today I’m more Agitator than Ghost. Anybody who wants to condemn me for that is perfectly welcome to.

Thing is, even in my most hardcore days, I wasn’t as “pure” as some folks. Go to the Mental Militia forums and look up the postings of suijurisfreeman if you really want to see hardcore. And I defy anybody to find me one, single freedomista on this earth who never violates a principle — never pays a sales tax for a purchase, lives on property which is neither taxed nor subsidized, totally ignores the existence of the state and all its works, drives boldly down the highway sans license and registration and doesn’t bother to stop when the red light flashes in the rear window because to stop would be to obey the unjust state. Show me the person who goes through life without a single compromise of principle. Show me.

The closest person I know to that ideal is my friend Joel. And even he survives amid compromise.

And unless you are that perfectly pure person whose life is the epitome of principle every moment of every day, then don’t go around condemning others for failing to take a step that you consider proper and necessary — but that also doesn’t cause you any huge inconvenience.

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MS Jordan posted in the comments section yesterday about Phil Mocek, the Seattle man just acquitted of four counts stemming from his polite refusal to show ID at the Albuqueuque, NM, airport. There’ve been a quite a few blips of info on Mocek, but this news story, with its video and links to earlier stories about Mocek, gives the best look I’ve found so far.

Took the jury all of an hour. No surprise. As usual the police/TSA account of Mocek “shouting” and creating a disturbance turns out to be a pack of lies. And as usual, the “authorities” didn’t know the law, either. They were just enforcing their thuggery.

The video Mocek took during the encounter is really something. It shows a perfect performance by a man who knows and asserts his rights. Mocek’s experienced at this — and other forms of activism, as well.

And probably he’s used to being dragged off to jail by thuggish boobs for contempt of cop.

Me, I’d rather stay home. Lorri, the friend I traveled to Panama with last year, is agitating for a trip to Australia. I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand. A natural twofer. Neither of us can afford it now so it’s a moot point, but even if we were rich, it would be too much of a Hobson’s choice. No, more properly a Morton’s fork. “Would you prefer the pube-groping or the nude-o-scanning today, ladies?”

Either way, I find myself feeling sad at a moment I’d like to be rejoicing for Mocek’s victory.

—–

In the nice, easy, doable privacy realm, Brad at WendyMcElroy.com reports there’s a new privacy-protecting search option. You know about StartPage, the European-based privacy-respecting alternative to Google. Well, now there’s a newcomer with the charmingly odd name DuckDuckGo.

I’m with Brad, I love DuckDuckGo’s sister site, DontTrack.Us. It not only has a simple, pictorial description of what Google and third-party advertisers do with your information, but once you’ve scrolled down to the very bottom they show their seriousness about privacy by listing and linking to a passel of privacy-enhancing browser add-ons.

Good on them. I still admire StartPage, which is represented in the U.S. by the amazing, awesome, fabulous, wonderful Katherine Albrecht. But the appearance of a privacy-loving competitor says maybe there’s a market for the good guys, eh?

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• The USA: Ninth freest nation on earth and proud to rank third among the “mostly free,” economically speaking. (Motto: “We take second place to none! But we take third place behind Ireland and Denmark.”) Deroy Murdock has a pretty good take on the news. (Although some of us might differ with what exactly “free trade” means. NAFTA? Gimme a break!)
• Via Joel. First thorough recap of “Project Gunwalker” I’ve seen. What, the ATF dirty? Causing the very problems it claims to want to solve? Nevah!
• You know all those new 1099 requirements in Obamacare? The ones everybody’s tearing their hair over but (so far) nobody can seem to manage to repeal? Fox says — terrible news! — that on top of everything else they’ll lead to more tax evasion. Whatever is this wicked world coming to?
• In Vietnam, they called this destroying the village to save it.
• Frank Furedi: In defense of individual moral autonomy and against the politics of nudging. Political nudging seems to be another term for that monstrous oxymoron “libertarian paternalism.” (Tip o’ hat to PT.)

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Excellent idea from Top of the Chain via Borepatch: a BUYcott to support Travis Corcoran, aka TJIC.

Top of the Chain sez:

Massachussetts has arbitrarily decided that the writer of a blog, in exercising his First Amendment right to infringe on his Second Amendment right by disarming him.

Travis is going to need money for the legal bills that are sure to follow. He runs an online comic book store. There are already comic book artists that are speaking out against him. What sweet irony would it be to buy something from Travis to help him make a living, that came from one of these bigoted fools?

Not interested in comics? Travis also has an online rental service for how-to videos of all sorts, from crafts to combat: SmartFlix.com.

I don’t agree with everything Travis writes, especially his belief that assassination is a valid political tool. He’s … um, more radical than I. (Now there’s something you won’t hear too often in these parts.) But even less should anybody agree with the thugs trying to deprive him of his first, second, and (as Buckeye Copperhead points out) his fourth amendment rights, as well — simply for making a remark that is roughly on par with the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea — only better because it explicitly seeks to save the innocent.

Spread the word — and some bux if you can — to BUYcott for TJIC.

The other day when TJIC’s friend Chris first posted about this outrage in the comments section and asked what can WE do, I didn’t answer. I’m not so good at being put on the spot for solutions. Bless the brilliance of the gunblogosphere.

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