It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know

A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game. But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”
Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted.

“At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.
Mr. Spitz’s information, Mr. Blaze pointed out, was not based on those frequent updates, but on how often Mr. Spitz checked his e-mail.
Mr. Spitz, a privacy advocate, decided to be extremely open with his personal information. Late last month, he released all the location information in a publicly accessible Google Document, and worked with a prominent German newspaper, Die Zeit, to map those coordinates over time.

“This is really the most compelling visualization in a public forum I have ever seen,” said Mr. Blaze, adding that it “shows how strong a picture even a fairly low-resolution location can give.”
In an interview from Berlin, Mr. Spitz explained his reasons: “It was an important point to show this is not some kind of a game. I thought about it, if it is a good idea to publish all the data — I also could say, O.K., I will only publish it for five, 10 days maybe. But then I said no, I really want to publish the whole six months.”

In the United States, telecommunication companies do not have to report precisely what material they collect, said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who specializes in privacy. He added that based on court cases he could say that “they store more of it and it is becoming more precise.”
“Phones have become a necessary part of modern life,” he said, objecting to the idea that “you have to hand over your personal privacy to be part of the 21st century.”

In the United States, there are law enforcement and safety reasons for cellphone companies being encouraged to keep track of its customers. Both the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration have used cellphone records to identify suspects and make arrests.

If the information is valuable to law enforcement, it could be lucrative for marketers. The major American cellphone providers declined to explain what exactly they collect and what they use it for.
Verizon, for example, declined to elaborate other than to point to its privacy policy, which includes: “Information such as call records, service usage, traffic data,” the statement in part reads, may be used for “marketing to you based on your use of the products and services you already have, subject to any restrictions required by law.”

AT&T, for example, works with a company, Sense Networks, that uses anonymous location information “to better understand aggregate human activity.” One product, CitySense, makes recommendations about local nightlife to customers who choose to participate based on their cellphone usage. (Many smartphone apps already on the market are based on location but that’s with the consent of the user and through GPS, not the cellphone company’s records.)

Because of Germany’s history, courts place a greater emphasis on personal privacy. Mr. Spitz first went to court to get his entire file in 2009 but Deutsche Telekom objected.
For six months, he said, there was a “Ping Pong game” of lawyers’ letters back and forth until, separately, the Constitutional Court there decided that the existing rules governing data retention, beyond those required for billing and logistics, were illegal. Soon thereafter, the two sides reached a settlement: “I only get the information that is related to me, and I don’t get all the information like who am I calling, who sent me a SMS and so on,” Mr. Spitz said, referring to text messages.

Even so, 35,831 pieces of information were sent to him by Deutsche Telekom as an encrypted file, to protect his privacy during its transmission.
Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile, Mr. Spitz’s carrier, wrote in an e-mail that it stored six months’ of data, as required by the law, and that after the court ruling it “immediately ceased” storing data.
And a year after the court ruling outlawing this kind of data retention, there is a movement to try to get a new, more limited law passed. Mr. Spitz, at 26 a member of the Green Party’s executive board, says he released that material to influence that debate.

“I want to show the political message that this kind of data retention is really, really big and you can really look into the life of people for six months and see what they are doing where they are.”
While the potential for abuse is easy to imagine, in Mr. Spitz’s case, there was not much revealed.
“I really spend most of the time in my own neighborhood, which was quite funny for me,” he said. “I am not really walking that much around.”

Any embarrassing details? “The data shows that I am flying sometimes,” he said, rather than taking a more fuel-efficient train. “Something not that popular for a Green politician.”

By NOAM COHEN NYTimes

PUNDIT PREP - THE WHITE HOUSE RESPONDS: "1) The lead seems to breeze past this statement 'having largely succeeded in stopping a rout of Libya's rebels,' with no acknowledgement that this is the core goal of the mission and the [Security Council resolution]. 2) The story asserts that 'Only on Thursday, the sixth day of air and missile strikes' did we give command of the [no-fly zone] to NATO. What is the standard you're comparing this effort to that leads you to believe 6 days is slow? Moreover, what should have happened that hasn't during those six days that impacted our core objective? 3) You assert that the coalition is fraying, but the trajectory is nothing but positive. First they agreed on AWACS. Then they agreed on implementing the arms embargo. Now they've agreed on giving C2 of the no fly zone to NATO. And they've tasked the planning to put civilian protection under NATO C2 as well. On top of that, you saw the UAE commit 6 F-16s and 6 Mirages today. How is that fraying?

"The international community has responded to Qaddafi's actions with unprecedented speed. It took two years of fighting in the former Yugoslavia before the UNSC passed a resolution establishing an [International Criminal Court] referral. It took 3 months for an arms embargo, and more than a year for an asset freeze and two years for a travel ban. Those things happened in 9 days in Libya. NATO began Operation Deliberate Force-the air campaign against Serb military forces, who had attacked civilians in UN Safe Areas in Bosnia-in August 1995, more than four years after the first bombing by Yugoslav Air Force against civilian targets in Croatia, and more than three years after the start of attacks against civilians in Bosnia.

"In March 1999, NATO began Operation Allied Force, an air campaign against Yugoslav ground forces in Kosovo and strategic targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This was more than a year after Serbian police began a series of violent raids in the Drenica region of Kosovo. Operation Odyssey Dawn commenced on March 19, two days after UNSCR 1973 was adopted by the Security Council, and 31 days after beginning of the Libyan peoples' uprising against Gaddafi. Somehow we have lost a needed sense of historical perspective in this discussion. Things that took years are taking days and weeks. Unprecedented support from Arab states is treated as cursory. And the prevention of a mass slaughter of Libyan people is written about as if it were not the core goal of the effort, but rather an aside."

In Defense of ‘Dithering’ By TIMOTHY EGAN NYTimes

Five years ago a young politician who seemed wise beyond his years was asked by Tim Russert what makes a great president. It was the kind of question that Russert, who could prompt more news in a single interview than entire cable operations do in a year, was so good at.

The politician took a thought breath before proceeding: “Obviously, most of the time it seems that the president has maybe 10 percent of his agenda set by himself, and 90 percent of it set by circumstance.”

Barack Obama: meet your 90 percent. The senator who so accurately predicted how events make the leader now finds himself a president trying to lead through those events.
In the process, despite a largely incoherent chorus of second-guessers, Obama has settled into a groove of reflective dithering before making his decisions. For the most part, it has served him well.

Think back to … oh, all of one week ago. The mercenaries of Muammar el-Qaddafi were closing in for the slaughter of people trying to take a breath of the same Arab Spring air going around Tunisia and Egypt.
Had Obama done nothing, as the Dennis Kucinich fringe Democrats and the Ron Paul isolationist Republicans would have it, the blood of many civilians would be filling the streets of Benghazi. Don’t forget: the regime had promised to chase its own citizens into closets and butcher them.

Or, had Obama put U.S. troops on the ground, as the imperious former Bush “diplomat” John Bolton insisted, a humanitarian mission would now be seen as another superpower invasion of an oil-rich Arab nation.

In his deliberative fashion, Obama ultimately saved countless lives in the short term, and will allow the rebels in Libya to own their revolution in the long term, if they can push ahead — a big if, of course. In the meantime, the economic and diplomatic noose will tighten around Qaddafi and the people he pays to kill on his behalf.

What Obama wanted to avoid, as he discussed during that same Russert interview, was the “messianic certainty” that led President George W. Bush to start a disastrous, trillion-dollar occupation of Iraq. In putting together an international coalition, backed by a United Nations resolution and the Arab League — all in record time — Obama also pulled off a nice bit of statecraft. And, had he used another day to reach out to Congress, there would be much less criticism at home.

Still, Republicans can’t cope with a president who tries to think before he leaps. Mitt Romney, who wakes most mornings in a groggy scramble to find his principles, faults Obama for the nuance of his Libya policy. How dare the president see shades of gray instead of black and white!

Newt Gingrich first criticized Obama for not imposing a no-fly zone, but now hits him for imposing a no-fly zone. You read that right. “I would not have intervened,” Gingrich said a few days ago. This followed a statement, barely two weeks ago, where he said he would intervene “this evening.” And he now calls the air strikes over Libya the worst foreign policy blunder in his lifetime.

Overstatement and misjudgment are Gingrich’s stock in trade — two reasons why he’ll never be president. He can always be counted on to fulminate on demand, with consistency the only casualty; the subject doesn’t matter.

The real problem for Republicans is that they are perplexed over what position to take on an issue that defies partisanship. So, Obama’s least-thoughtful critics attack him for thinking.

Ponderous deliberation, which doesn’t sit well in an age when we all move information with our thumbs, has been a hallmark of the Obama presidency from the beginning. His 90 percent of circumstances started on Inauguration Day, when Bush handed him the worse recession since the Great Depression, and continued through an oil spill that nearly poisoned an entire ecosystem.

During the spill, it was liberal cable pundits who wanted a president who could shout, emote and point fingers. Instead, he quickly negotiated a $20 billion escrow fund from BP that attempts to make whole those hurt by the spill. Similar success followed with the auto bailout, which saved General Motors, but cost Obama much of his early political capital.

There are certainly inconsistencies in the Obama approach to Libya. Why not help the protesters who are clubbed and jailed by our ally in Bahrain? “Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma?” Obama asked in one of his books. “We can’t arbitrate a civil war,” he argued. As president, those questions are no longer Hyde Park parlor debates.

A poll just published by Reuters/Ipsos found 48 percent of respondents describing Obama’s military leadership as “cautious and consultative.”
Another 36 percent chose “indecisive and dithering.”

I would argue that the combined 84 percent are basically saying the same thing — that this president is anything but impulsive.
 And next year, with an improving economy in a world where the United States is held in much higher regard, most people will probably choose a president who takes time to get it right, rather than one who is afraid to dither for a good outcome.

'Superbug' spreading to Southern California hospitals  March 24,2011  09:55

 

A dangerous drug-resistant bacterium has spread to patients in Southern California, according to a study by Los Angeles County public health officials.
More than 350 cases of carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, or CRKP, have been reported at healthcare facilities in Los Angeles County, mostly among elderly patients at skilled-nursing and long-term care facilities, according to a study by Dr. Dawn Terashita, an epidemiologist with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
It was not clear from the study how many of the infections proved fatal, but other studies in the U.S. and Israel have shown that about 40% of patients with the infection die. Tereshita was not available for comment Thursday morning but was scheduled to speak about the study in the afternoon.
"These are very serious infections, hugely complicated by the fact that the treatment options are severely limited," said Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director for healthcare-associated infection-prevention programs at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The L.A. County Department of Public Health describes CRKP as an antibiotic-resistant organism that "can cause infections in healthcare settings, including pneumonia, bloodstream infections, wound or surgical site infections, and meningitis."

The pathogen is even resistant to specialized drugs developed to treat difficult infections. "This is considered a threat to patient safety," according to the county, because such antibiotics "often are the last line of defense." Unlike other superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the CRKP pathogen is an enterobacterium, in the same "lethal family" of bacteria as E. coli, Srinivasan said.
"We've been monitoring the rise of this organism for a few years at CDC," he said. "Initially, it was first described in North Carolina, and then we started getting reports in the New York and New Jersey area. We are seeing reports of this organism all over the country now."
He stressed that unlike MRSA and other superbugs, CRKP has not spread in communities but remains confined to healthcare facilities.
"The key is that it remains pretty rare in most places," he said, although, "there are pockets of the country where they are encountering this a lot, like New York City."
The superbug is usually treated with the antibiotic colistin, which is so strong it is often toxic to patients but in other cases has not proved strong enough to overcome the bacterium, Srinivasan said.
The CDC recommends an aggressive approach in preventing the spread of the bacterium, including isolating infected patients and testing those around them.
Prevention is key, Srinivasan said, including ensuring regular hand washing by healthcare workers and other basic infection-control measures.
Tereshita analyzed the results of patient tests the health department required hospitals and labs to submit June 1, 2010, to Dec. 31, 2010. Reports were filed by 102 hospitals and five labs.
Of the infections reported, 146 (42%) occurred at eight long-term acute-care hospitals, one of which had an outbreak.
An additional 20 cases were reported at skilled-nursing facilities.
The rest were reported at acute-care hospitals. Particular facilities were not identified in the report.
The mean age of patients who tested positive for the pathogen was 73, and more than half were female, the study showed.
Terashita concluded that CRKP was more common in Los Angeles County than public health officials had thought (possibly because cases had not been reported accurately), that hospitals need to do a better job of reporting infections and that healthcare facilities need to raise awareness about the bug to prevent the spread of infection.
"These patients tend to travel frequently between these and other healthcare facilities," she wrote.
Terashita's study had been embargoed for release at a conference of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America in Dallas, beginning on April 1, but several news organizations decided to publish the results Thursday, citing the "public health concerns involved."

Lawrence Taylor reacts to sentenceDuring an interview after he was sentenced to six years' probation on Tuesday, Lawrence Taylor made no apologies for visiting a prostitute.

---

Speaking to Shepard Smith on Fox, Taylor did say that he did not look for an underage girl. The victim in the case was 16 at the time of the incident last May. In January, he pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct and patronizing a prostitute to avoid jail time.

	Lawrence Taylor leaves Rockland County Courthouse on Tuesday after his sentencing. He did not speak in court but later lashed out in a TV interview.

"That's not my M.O. I've been around kids and people all my life," said Taylor, a former New York Giants Hall of Fame linebacker. "I'm not the cause of prostitution. And sometimes I make mistakes and I may go out there, but I didn't pick her up at no playground. She wasn't hiding behind the school bus or getting off a school bus. This is a working girl that came to my room. And I don't know what her age was. I asked her age. She told me she was 19. It is what it is."

Taylor blamed the institution of prostitution for the fact that he ended up with an underage girl.

"It's the world of prostitution," he said to Fox. "You never know what you're gonna get. Is it gonna be a pretty girl, an ugly girl or whatever it's gonna be."

Or a young girl? Shepard asked.

"You can only ask," Taylor said. "I don't card them. I don't ask for birth certificate."

Taylor said he had "no beef" with the girl.

"I'll take my punishment like I should, but my problem is at home with my wife, so that's really the only one I have to answer to," he said.

How did he get in this situation in the first place?

"It happens sometimes," Taylor said. "I'd been on the road 10 or 11 days and I came in to town. Actually, I made a phone call to a friend of mine, and he made a phone call."

Taylor said he has used the services of prostitutes in the past, especially between 1994 and 2001 when he was not married.

"I'm not looking for a relationship. Hey, sometimes I look for some company," Taylor said. "It's all clean. I don't have to worry about your feelings. It's all clean. I'm not saying it's right. It's the oldest profession in the world."

But right or wrong, Taylor appears to not consider prostitution a serious crime.

"I guess you call it a crime," he said. "It's one of those crimes you don't think about. You never think you're gonna get busted because everyone does it until you get busted, and then it's more embarrassing than anything else."ESPNNewYork.com

The single stupidest right-wing reaction to the Libya campaign

Hillary Clinton and Moammar Gadhafi

 

The conservative press has not yet coordinated its official position on the United States' military actions in Libya. They dislike Obama and Gadhafi almost equally. They love wars but consider Democrats feckless at waging them. The "good guys" in this particular fight are disconcertingly Islamic. A sign of the confusion: Rush Limbaugh's position a few days back was "it's a tricky situation." That's not exactly the clear-cut message his listeners have come to expect. (Though Rush did argue that our president is fighting to establish sharia law in Libya.)
Glenn Beck was fairly schizophrenic in his response to the idea of American intervention last week, though presumably he'll devote this week's programs to determining his actual position on the matter.
For the best of real-time mainstream right-wing reaction to the Libyan campaign, we turn to the National Review Online. The posts at The Corner today are a mixture of skepticism about those rebels -- there have been reports that some of them may be Muslims -- and the barely restrained ecstasy of the war blogger greeting a brand-new invasion. Jim Manzi helpfully explains that the United States cannot afford war, a classic conservative argument from the olden times that the right is rapidly Taking Back from the hippies. Victor Davis Hanson opposes the intervention because, you know, Obama = Carter and all that. (Andrew McCarthy is among those who've rediscovered the constitutional need for a congressional declaration of war. Partisans from both sides have taken turns ignoring that requirement for a century now, and it's always nice when they remember it again.) Pete Hoekstra writes in to say: "We should be under no illusions -- to fix it will be hard and will take more than a few days!"

And Mark Krikorian says ... well, Krikorian examines the issue quite creatively. It is actually about uppity women. Our "enemies" have "learned," he says, "that our commander-in-chief is an effete vacillator who is pushed around by his female subordinates." His problem isn't with women, he clarifies. His problem is that Obama looks like a weakling and those awful women "nagged him to attack Libya until he gave in."
America has a president who gives in when women nag him. This cannot stand. This will make America look weak to everyone who isn't as enlightened as "sensitive New Age guy" Krikorian.

Do you think Putin and A-jad and Chavez and the ChiComs are more afraid of Obama now? It was obvious to most of us that Hillary has more, uh, stones than Obama, but to have it confirmed so publicly for less-attentive foreign goons means they’re that much more likely to try to push us and see how The One responds.

So, there you have it. This war is a bad idea because Barack Obama isn't manly enough to stand up to his emasculating staff of harpies. Women!

• Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon

Nearly 7 in 10 support air strikes in Libya, CBS News poll finds

Nearly seven in ten Americans support the use of military air strikes in Libya in order to protect civilians from attacks by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, a new CBS News poll finds.

In a survey taken on Sunday and Monday, following Saturday's first round of U.N.-sanctioned missile and air strikes aimed at Libya, 68 percent of Americans said they approved of the military action. Just 26 percent said they disapproved.
Eight in 10 Americans want budget compromise
Support for new nuclear plants drops
Fifty percent of Americans said they approved of how President Obama was handling the situation in Libya, and the president earned more support from Republicans on the issue than he did on domestic issues like the economy and the deficit. Forty-three percent of Republicans said they approved of Mr. Obama's handling of the Libya situation, according to the poll, and 41 percent disapproved. Sixty-six percent of Democrats approved, as did 43 percent of Independents.


Nearly three in four Americans also said they expected the air strikes to be effective on some level, although respondents' confidence levels dipped in regard to the extent of the strikes' predicted success: Just 20 percent of respondents said they thought the strikes would be "very effective" in protecting Libyan citizens, while 54 percent said they thought the actions would be "somewhat effective." Eighteen percent said they thought the recent military actions in Libya would be not very - or not at all - effective.

More than four in five Americans say that what happens in Libya is important to the U.S., according to the survey, including 38 percent who said they considered it "very important." Last month, 46 percent felt what was happening in Egypt was "very important" to the U.S.

Americans have supported this type of military action before. According to a CBS News Poll conducted in September 1995, 59 percent of Americans approved of air strikes in Bosnia during the war there. In March 1999, 51 percent favored US and NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War.

We’re All Badgers Now

A conversation about unionization and higher education between Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

SF: In over 35 years of friendship and conversation, Walter Michaels and I have disagreed on only two things, and one of them was faculty and graduate student unionization. He has always been for and I had always been against. I say “had” because I recently flipped and what flipped me, pure and simple, was Wisconsin.

When I think about the reasons (too honorific a word) for my previous posture I become embarrassed. They are by and large the reasons rehearsed and apparently approved by Naomi Schaefer Riley in her recent op-ed piece “Why unions hurt higher education” (USA Today). The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction — that someone with an advanced degree and scholarly publications should not be in the same category as factory workers with lunch boxes and hard hats. As Riley points out, even the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) used to be opposed to unionization because of “the commonly held belief that universities were not corporations and faculty were not employees.”

WBM: But at UIC, where I worked for Stanley and where many of us are working right now to build a union, “a lunch bucket faculty for a lunch bucket student body” is a standard way of describing us, originally intended as a form of condescension but increasingly accepted as a badge of honor. Why is it a bad thing that our students aren’t as rich as the ones at Northwestern or the University of Chicago? Why is it a bad thing to accept the fact that we are workers? We’re fortunate that some of us are pretty well-paid workers, but many of us aren’t and, well-paid or not, we all have less and less of a say in what our university does and how it does it. When workers want a voice, what do they do? Unionize! So even though our job descriptions range from professor to principal investigator and we make more books than widgets, that’s what we’re trying to do.

SF: I have to agree. If “universities are not corporations” ever was a good argument, it isn’t anymore because universities, always corporations in financial fact, become increasingly corporate in spirit every day; and if I and my colleagues are not employees, from whom do we receive salaries, promotions, equipment, offices, etc., and to whom are we responsible in the carrying out of our duties? (If it looks like a duck . . . .) It’s not God and it’s not (despite some claims to the contrary) students, and it’s not awestruck admirers of our dazzling intellects. It must be our employer, and if that is so the only question becomes whether, as employees, we can do better for ourselves by ourselves or whether we will be in a stronger position if we unite.
That’s not the simple question it appears to be, because for a small percentage of academics there is something like a free agent market: another university comes calling and you’re in the nice position of being able to pit your current employer against your suitor and wait to see who will come up with the best package. But most of us are not in this position, and so it doesn’t pay (quite literally) to conceptualize our situation as if we were all stars. Once we accept as a baseline the average hardworking instructor or the completely vulnerable adjunct the case for unionization, at least on the level of professional self-interest, seems compelling.
It has not seemed compelling to those who see an ill fit between what is essentially a meritocracy (the question asked in tenure and hiring meetings is always “Who is the smartest?”) and the tendency — or so it is said — of unions to protect members who are marginally competent. If academics opt for unions and “a belt-and-suspenders security,” Riley warns, we might “expect that even the laziest, most incompetent or radical professor won’t get fired.”
It is when I read a sentence like this one of Riley’s that I come to my senses and recognize what’s going on. “Lazy” and “incompetent” go together; they point to deficiencies we don’t want our teachers to display. But “radical” is a political judgment. What Riley fears is that if colleges and universities were unionized, teachers with far out, discomforting ideas couldn’t be fired. It’s hard to imagine a better argument for unions (and also for tenure). The autonomy and independence of the academy is perpetually threatened by efforts to impose an ideological test on hiring and firing decisions. The goal is always to create a faculty that has the right (pun intended) partisan hue. Riley makes no bones about it. Letting the unions get a foothold “could . . . make the environment more left leaning.” The message is clear: keep those unions out so that we can more easily get rid of the lefties.

WBM: At UIC, we’re not so worried about our bosses weeding out the radicals — our administration has been staunch in its support of academic freedom. But what amazes us is the idea that somehow a faculty can’t be both unionized and, to use the word invoked by Riley in her USA Today piece and by our own provost in his communications to the faculty, “elite.” This would come as a shock to the Rutgers philosophy department, which works on a unionized campus and which is nonetheless ranked as one of the two best in the U.S. And it’s even a bit of a shock to the UIC English department, which isn’t as elite as Rutgers philosophy but is (according to the National Research Council) among the top 20 in the country, and which almost unanimously supports unionization. Riley may think that only the “laziest” want unions, but our ranking is based largely on the strength of faculty productivity — it’s the hard-working ones who want the union most.
Why? Because we think that the people who actually do the teaching and the research should have more of a say in how the teaching and the research gets done. Riley quotes the president of the University of Buffalo saying, “Unionization runs contrary to what you’re socialized to do if you’re a researcher. The notion of belonging to a herd seems on the face of it inappropriate.” But since when does having a voice in what happens in your own workplace count as belonging to the herd? The president of Buffalo, despite the fact that Buffalo is itself unionized, apparently thinks that rugged individualism consists in shutting up and doing what management tells you to do.
But why should we shut up? Who else actually cares about our teaching and research? People like Riley claim that we should be worried about how unionization will “affect the quality of higher education in America.” But whether you’re a radical or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat, it’s easy to see that the unions aren’t what’s destroying the public colleges and universities. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen Illinois and states all around the country beat a rapid retreat from their commitment to public higher education. We’ve seen the increased transfer of undergraduate teaching to non-tenure-track faculty who are paid at a wage that, if they were supporting a family of four, would qualify them for food stamps. We’ve seen more money spent on administering universities and less money spent on the teaching and the research that are the only reasons the universities exist in the first place. Unions aren’t the problem. They’re the beginning of the solution.

SF: The erosion of support for public higher education is a part of a larger strategy designed to deprive public employees of a voice and ensure the triumph of conservative/neoliberal policies. Republican legislators in New Hampshire propose taking the vote away from college students and say straight out that they want to do it because students are known to be liberal. Governor Walker of Wisconsin cites budgetary woes as the reason for taking away the bargaining rights of public sector unions, but everyone knows his real reason is to reduce union membership (why join and pay dues if there is no longer any strength in numbers?) and thus dry up support that would have gone largely to Democratic candidates. Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (shouldn’t there be a patent on names?) makes it official: “If we win this battle and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions . . . President Obama is going to have a . . . much more difficult time getting elected.”
Fitzgerald, Walker and Riley remind me of something I had forgotten, cocooned as I have been in the small world of the academy. With apologies to John Donne, “no university is an Island” and “ask not at whom the union-bashing is aimed; it is aimed at you,” even if you (like me) are relatively insulated from its immediate effects. Should Governor Walker have his way (as it seems he has), should New Hampshire Republicans succeed in disqualifying citizens likely to vote against them, should Riley’s admonition that “students, parents and taxpayers . . . think twice about how unionization affects the quality of higher education” be heeded, the result will be a further entrenchment of the interests that labor to monopolize wealth and power and to create a world in which any of us can be dismissed in the name of achieving a “more flexible workforce,” that is, a workforce that has no choice but to accept whatever its masters deign to offer.
We are all badgers now.

ATF gunwalking scandal: Second agent speaks out

ATF allegedly encouraged U.S. gun sales to Mexican drug traffickers -- Now there's evidence other agencies knew about program

• Play CBS Video Video Second ATF agent speaks out against "Gunrunner"

• Sharyl Attkisson reports on Rene Jaquez, a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, who has publicly condemned the alleged practice of the ATF to allow guns from the U.S. into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico.

• WASHINGTON - South of El Paso, Texas, on Mexico's side of the border, lies Juarez - the most dangerous city in the world. CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports ATF Special Agent Rene Jaquez has been stationed there for the past year, trying to keep U.S. guns from being trafficked into Mexico.

"That's what we do as an agency," Jaquez said. "ATF's primary mission is to make sure that we curtail gun trafficking."

That's why Jaquez tells CBS News he was so alarmed to hear his own agency may have done the opposite: encouraged U.S. gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexico's drug cartels. Apparently, ATF hoped that letting weapons "walk" onto the street - to see where they'd end up - would help them take down a cartel.



Jaquez is so opposed to the strategy, he's speaking out. "You don't let guns walk. I've never let a gun walk."

Read Agent Jaquez's most recent job performance evaluation summary from ATF management.


Yet ATF agents told us they were ordered to let thousands of weapons walk. Two of them, assault rifles, were later found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona last December. Another gunrunning suspect under ATF surveillance was linked to the shooting of Customs Agent Jaime Zapata. And sources say many more "walked" weapons turned up at Mexican crime scenes.

Agent: I was ordered to let U.S. guns into Mexico

Jaquez said, "I think this incidence is probably one of the darkest days in ATF's history."

But ATF wasn't working alone on the case known as "Fast and Furious." Documents show ATF had conference calls with "DHS" (Homeland Security). "USMS" (U.S. Marshals) and DEA. An "ICE," or Customs agent, was on ATF's Fast and Furious team. They were advised by an "AUSA," or Assistant U.S. Attorney under the Justice Department.

AK47s vs. bean bags in border drug war

Justice Department head Eric Holder said the inspector general is investigating. "The aim of the ATF is to try to stop the flow of guns. I think they do a good job in that regard. Questions have been raised by ATF agents about the way in which some of these operations have been conducted. I think those questions have to be taken seriously, and on that basis, I've asked the inspector general to look at it."

Holder: Gunwalking is wrong

Jaquez is second sitting ATF agent to come forward and speak out to CBS News on the controversy.

Jaquez says one of the most difficult things for him is believing that his own agency  inadvertently put innocent lives at risk. Jaquez has family - uncles, aunts, father and sister - living in Mexico. "Any one of us could have been shot with one of those guns."

Video: NRA members "outraged" over "gunwalking" reports
Jaquez says he's left wondering whether runaway violence in Mexico can be partly blamed on the agency tasked with stopping it.

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