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Monthly Archives

January 2020

BlogFrom the Desk of Bob BarrLiberty Updates

Companies Join With Government to Erase Fourth Amendment Privacy Protections

by Liberty Guard Author January 29, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

In years gone by there existed an understanding that one’s personal information surrendered to private companies was a voluntary choice – the “cost,” if you will, to obtaining the benefit of a company’s goods or services.  Importantly – and constitutionally – such a “trade off” was far different from the government obtaining personal and private information by way of surveillance or other information-gathering actions undertaken without a warrant.  

There was a relatively clear line between private company collection of personal information voluntarily provided, and the government gathering such information without one’s knowledge or consent.  Today, that “line” has been blurred to the point of near erasure.

Government officials, of course, have never been short on creative ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on unreasonable and warrantless gathering of information.  We all are familiar, for example, with the abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act procedures by previous administrations, whereby the federal government was able to unlawfully surveil U.S. citizens’ private communications.  Some of us also may recall the FBI’s use of Best Buy’s “Geek Squad” technicians to browse computers for illegal content while on service calls. 

But with the digital age have come new opportunities for companies and government agencies alike to spy on citizens. 

The rise of social media and other technological advancements — geo-tracking and at-home DNA testing — have led to an explosion of highly personal information shared openly with third parties — and in turn, government agencies as well. Like throwing chum in the water to attract sharks, this treasure trove of data in the hands of private companies has caught the attention of government agencies at all levels; especially law enforcement agencies suddenly freed from the strictures of the Fourth Amendment. 

While some companies, like Apple, have at times put up a principled fight against such incursions, despite backlash from the Department of Justice, most others have shown little hesitancy to cooperating with government agencies. 

Earlier this year, one of the largest at-home DNA testing companies, FamilyTreeDNA, was outed for voluntarily helping the FBI with criminal investigations, without notifying its customers of how their DNA samples were being used. Just this month, a company called Clearview AI boasted it had scraped three billion facial images from public sources, including from social media, to create a facial-recognition product, which it happily shares with law enforcement.

While users may trust that a company or app will protect their data, recent revelations of the cozy sharing relationship between companies and the government prove that such trust is badly misplaced. Even what many people might consider nominal and unimportant data points, such as photos or geolocation information, can be harvested, bundled, and databased in ways that far exceed what is expected, or known, by the users – data over which the original collection company loses control once shared with other companies or government agencies. 

Today’s privacy reality is that it is now impossible to draw a distinction between data harvesting undertaken by the private sector, and that of the public sector. The only realistic assumption must be that any data collected by third parties in the private sector can, and at some point, will, be subjected to law enforcement investigations regardless of when that information was first shared by the consumer, or under what privacy policies. 

The willingness of companies in the private sector to cooperate with law enforcement officials has become the new norm. Absent meaningful state or federal statutory protections of consumer data explicitly stating this data is off-limits to law enforcement without a warrant, this trend will only worsen.

Any breach of personal privacy is a danger to individual liberty, but the true threat is the consolidation of these breaches over time, eventually leading to a comprehensive profile of every citizen that includes information such as DNA profile, facial recognition, health and financial histories, online activity, and real-time location. This is, after all, precisely what China is doing with the massive “social credit” system it is quickly implementing for its entire population. You can bet social media companies and internet search engines in our country are paying rapt attention to how that process unfolds, and explains why these companies are opposed to even the most basic legislative reform proposals.

January 29, 2020 0 comment
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Uncategorized

Bob Barr on The Ingraham Angle

by Liberty Guard Author January 28, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author
January 28, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Former US Attorney & Clinton Impeachment Manager, Bob Barr, on Impeachment

by Liberty Guard Author January 28, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author
January 28, 2020 0 comment
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Blog

Schiff’s Concerns About Rigging The 2020 Election Are Real, But Misdirected

by Liberty Guard Author January 27, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

The Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

In one of his more outlandish pronouncements during last week’s never-ending impeachment managers’ Opening Argument in the Senate trial of President Donald Trump, Rep. Adam Schiff declared it vital that the President be found guilty and removed from office right now, because he has shown himself to be an electoral “cheater.” As seen through the hate-colored lenses by which Schiff and his Democrat Party view the political landscape, if Trump remains in office November’s election results cannot possibly be trusted.

While voters clearly have reason to be concerned about vote manipulation, it is not Donald Trump who should worry us; it is Google.

“Search engine manipulation effect” (SEME) has been familiar to behavioralists for several years. It is the process of manipulating internet users’ preferences through deliberate but subtle – more precisely, surreptitious – algorithmic changes in search engine preference rankings.  One way to achieve this is through the “autocomplete function” that search engine Google provides users to facilitate their searches; directing them based on secret algorithms and user history.

The autocomplete function used by internet search engines completes a search term or phrase being entered by a user before the user deliberately completes it himself or herself. In this way, the search engine interposes its search preferences for those of the user, in such manner that the user is not consciously aware of such manipulation. While the vast majority of instances in which a search engine engages autocomplete are those in which the user is simply searching for a factual term or phrase (e.g., “the Bill of Rights was ratified in what year?”), there is far more room for the search engine to subjectively direct a user when the query is more open-ended or includes a hot-button political term or name of a candidate.

Extensive research by Robert Epstein, a self-described center-left supporter of Hillary Clinton, established that search algorithms utilized by Google had “suppressed negative autocomplete search results relating to Hillary Clinton.” This was described in a December 2016 article in The Guardian, but more recently Epstein testified last July before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution chaired by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, that “[i]n 2016, biased search results generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.”

Epstein went on to testify that, “biased search results can easily produce shifts in the opinions and voting preference of undecided voters by 20 percent or more – up to 80 percent in some demographic groups.” Despite assurances in 2016 from Google that its use of algorithmic-based autocomplete processes are unbiased and designed simply to “prevent offensive terms, like porn and hate speech, from appearing” in a user’s inquiry, Epstein testified that “Google employees deliberately engineer” such processes “to change people’s thinking.”

Epstein also discussed the manner by which Google manipulated tens of millions of voters at all levels of government, through its selective “Go Vote” reminders; under the guise of performing a “public service.” He concluded his startling congressional testimony by noting that, “Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015.”

Epstein did not limit his expert testimony to simply identifying the problem of search-engine voter manipulation; he suggested a remedy. He recommended the federal government address this grave and worsening problem not by censorship, which some in Congress have endorsed, but rather by declaring the “database [Google] uses to generate search results .  .  .  to be a ‘public commons,’” accessible to other search platforms.  This would prompt and promote competition in much the same way a similar move decades ago against AT&T, ushered in an era of phenomenal and innovative competition in telecommunications.

Whether those in Washington will listen to non-partisan experts like Epstein and do something to rein in the uncontrolled manipulation of voters by Google and other search engines, remains to be seen.

However, if attention continues to focus on the specious, anti-Trump scolding of Adam Schiff and the Democrat Party in the lead up to this November’s election, the more likely it becomes that Epstein’s dire warnings of massive voter manipulation by Google and other search engines will in fact take place – which is, after all, exactly what the Democrats want.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003.  He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

January 27, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Clinton Impeachment Manager Reacts To Trump Defense Team’s Opening Arguments

by Liberty Guard Author January 25, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author
January 25, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Bob Barr on PoliticKING with Larry King

by Liberty Guard Author January 22, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author
January 22, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Bob Barr on Bloomberg Radio

by Liberty Guard Author January 22, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

Guest host Greg Stohr, Bloomberg Supreme Court reporter discussed the lastest impeachment news with guests Bob Barr, former Republican Georgia Congressman and former House Manager for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and Bloomberg politics editor Anna Edgerton.

January 22, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Bob Barr on Savage Nation

by Liberty Guard Author January 22, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

https://t.co/qGZxBWz4No?amp=1

January 22, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Former Rep. Bob Barr, Clinton impeachment manager, on ‘fatally flawed’ case against Trump

by Liberty Guard Author January 22, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/former-rep-bob-barr-clinton-impeachment-manager-on-fatally-flawed-case-against-trump

January 22, 2020 0 comment
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BlogFrom the Desk of Bob BarrLiberty Updates

Iran’s Incompetence is a Nuclear Nightmare

by Liberty Guard Author January 22, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

The list of reasons Iran should not become a nuclear nation is lengthy; but recent events present the starkest reason yet why that must never happen.

In the broadest sense, nuclear power should not belong to a nation that openly talks about eliminating an entire race of people from the planet. Rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, Iran’s theocratic regime clearly cannot be trusted to use such power only for deterrent purposes. 

The recent downing of a civilian aircraft by its military forces serves as a glaringly obvious, practical reason why Iran must never gain access to military nuclear technology — incompetence. 

Contrary to the visage of Iran as a mega-presence on the world stage (a view regularly promoted by the regime’s leaders), the country is not a formidable military presence by modern standards. Our Defense Intelligence Agency notes that the Iranian regime in recent years has emphasized military improvements to its forces.  However, as a result of embargoes on foreign-produced technology, such improvements have been hamstrung by sanctions and internal financial troubles.  Iran’s once modern air force now is comprised of aging fighter jets, and its ballistic missile arsenal – the backbone of its military power – includes many that the DIA believes to be old and inaccurate.

As calculated by the military-tracking organization GlobalFirePower.com, Iran’s military power ranks 14th in the world, behind countries such as Egypt and Brazil. While the military threat posed by Iran is not one to be taken lightly, it is not one that warrants the same degree of concern as Russia’s or China’s. Iran’s offensive strength lies in its ability and predisposition to engage in asymmetrical warfare; causing regional or cyberspace disruptions as opposed to full-on military conflict.

Becoming a nuclear power, however, remains an obsession of Iran’s leaders. And it is in this regard that what happened earlier this month must remain at the forefront of efforts by the United States and our allies to ensure Iran’s dream never materializes.  The demonstrated inability by the country’s military to properly use a rudimentary missile air defense system, resulting in the accidental shoot-down of a civilian aircraft, underscores the practical need to keep more lethal weapons out of the regime’s hands. 

Arming Iran with nuclear weapons, or even non-nuclear weaponry significantly more advanced and powerful than is currently available to them, is akin to putting a teenager behind the wheel of a 707-horsepower Dodge Charger Hellcat; a move irresponsible in the extreme.

Complicating matters further is the serious disconnect between Iran’s military leaders and its civilian authorities, a problem that was on full display following the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. The lack of transparency and accountability displayed in the aftermath of that tragedy is symptomatic of the manner by which the country has been governed for more than four decades.  It is a dysfunctional system that breeds mistrust and secrecy, to the point that one hand does not know what the other hand is doing.

In such a closed theocratic system, true accountability is neither fostered nor tolerated.  If forced by domestic or outside pressure to admit mistake, the action taken will be as limited and short-lived as possible; resulting in no systemic or long-term reform and essentially guaranteeing future blunders.  

Though much more limited in scope, Iran’s downing of Flight 752 is reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Chernobyl was the byproduct of political obsession, shoddy engineering, systemic fear of voicing concern, cultural hubris and overall breakdown in communication between civilian and government agencies.  As we later learned, the catastrophe was very nearly global in scope; but also one that would have been avoidable in virtually any non-totalitarian society. In Soviet Russia, however, Chernobyl was the result of government hubris and dysfunction.  

Similarly, Iran appears un-phased by the killing of 176 civilians in a completely avoidable accident; choosing instead to cast blame on the United States for the tense regional environment in which the catastrophic military blunder happened. This, on top of its general incompetence, is all the more reason for a reinvigorated global effort to keep nuclear weapons out of Iran’s reach.  A key element of this effort must be to renew the U.N. arms embargo currently set to expire in October, which would free Iran to update its military and pursue far more deadly and advanced weaponry.

Iran has offered the world absolutely no reason to suggest it is morally or practically capable of being trusted with weapons of mass destruction, and the downing of Flight 752 this month is only the latest reminder. We need not give them more opportunities to further prove us right.

January 22, 2020 0 comment
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