Tips on how to fight government spying A4 Tuesday, November 5, 2013
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone conversations are far more interesting than our own, but it’s no reason to be complacent. “We’re basically turning citizens into human intel for the country. Welcome to the Surveillance State,” said software developer Andrew Stone. “All communications are being spied upon – phone, email, Skype, web browsing. Massive amounts of data are being collected.” Stone isn’t your wild-eyed activist. He’s best known as developer of the popular mobile application Twittelator for the iPhone and iPad. His Albuquerque-based Stone Design Corp. has published more than 35 software titles for generations of Macintosh operating systems. Stone joined computing legend Steve Jobs after Jobs, forced out of Apple, started his own company, NeXT. Stone is still an independent developer for
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SHERRY ROBINSON
ALL SHE WROTE
Apple. Early in his career, Stone decided that his pursuit of software wouldn’t be “just tech for tech’s sake but to make life better,” and he’s passionate about that. His inspiration for Twittelator, which helps users manage multiple Twitter accounts, was the report of the young Egyptian jailed during demonstrations in his country who tweeted his friends and got released. That’s the right reason for technology. Stone is indignant when technology is used for the wrong reasons, which in his view is what
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the National Security Agency is doing now. “Yahoo, Google, Facebook all have back doors that are being monitored,” he said during a meeting of New Mexico Press Women. “The guy who had the nerve to tell the truth is now in Russia, but (Director of National Intelligence) James Clapper lies to Congress and nothing happens to him.” He sees a historic metaphor in the Panopticon, a circular structure conceived in 1791 that allowed guards to see inmates in their cells from a single point. The inmates assumed they were being watched all the time. The latest spy technology is just a version of the Panopticon. It’s not entirely bad. The grocery store gives me coupons based on my past purchases. Police may detect crime before it happens. Doctors are starting to predict disease based on your DNA. On the other hand, the information net
may allow the bank to deny your loan. Journalists can’t guarantee anonymity to sources, so sources dry up. “All of our stuff is being watched,” he said. “It will have a chilling effect on free speech. Legal, peaceful citizen activism is being squashed.” What to do? First, stop feeding the beast. “We the citizens provide crowdsource information,” Stone says. “Stop tagging your friends. We’re doing it to ourselves.” Second, inform yourself. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) is a useful and effective source of information and action steps. The foundation has created the Surveillance Self-Defense site to provide information and tools to evaluate the threat and defend against it. Second, fight fire with fire. You can use software like the free, open-source Tor Project (torpro-
ject.org) to protect your privacy. “The worst thing is to think you’re safe and not being listened to, but you are,” Stone says. His final piece of advice is ironic coming from somebody who’s highly successful in the world of computing: “Go analog. Take a walk. Visit your neighbors. Talk about it.” Stone and some of his fellow programmers are rediscovering the value of face to face communications. After realizing that they were all too isolated, he began bringing them together every Thursday morning at a coffee shop to socialize and talk shop. The group, called the Cocoa Conspiracy, has also evolved into casual economic development, as people pitch ideas and seek input. Stone helps form teams and serves as in-house expert. Says Stone: “Stay human. It’s the one thing we can always do in the face of the machine.”
EDITORIAL
Taxpayers’ $7 billion subsidy to fastfood profits should end
Is fast food so vital to the nation that taxpayers should spend $7 billion a year to supplement the industry’s profits? Imagine the outcry if that was proposed.
And yet a study by economists at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center says it’s already happening.
Seven billion dollars a year is what it costs taxpayers for Medicaid, food stamps and the other public assistance programs for fast-food workers who are paid povertylevel wages. A second report, “Super -Sizing Public Costs” by the National Employment Law Project, said low wages and missing benefits at the 10 largest fast-food companies in the country cost taxpayers about $3.8 billion a year. Another way to look at it: McDonald’s posted $1.5 billion in third-quarter profits. Taxpayers paid $1.2 billion last year for public assistance to the McDonald’s workforce. That’s $300 million per quarter, a 20 percent contribution to the company’s bottom line. It’s enough to give you indigestion.
The academic study — “Fast Food, Poverty Wages” — shows that more than half of the nation’s 1.8 million “core” fast-food workers rely on the federal safety net to survive. Core workers are front-line, nonmanagerial employees. Collectively these workers get $1.9 billion through the nation’s earned income tax credit, $1 billion in food stamps and $3.9 billion through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The study examined employees who work at least 11 hours a week and 27 weeks a year. Of that group, 28 percent worked 40 hours a week and half of them also relied on federal public assistance to make ends meet.
Rallies, job walkouts and demonstrations this summer in St. Louis and elsewhere around the country highlighted the plight of fast-food workers. Labor organizers and social service advocates have been calling for higher wages for the workers, whose median hourly pay is $8.69. The minimum wage in Missouri is $7.35 an hour, with an automatic increase built into the law to reflect inflation. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Activists also are urging the workers to seek collective bargaining agreements.
US becoming a welfare nation
My parents were children during the Great Depression, and it scarred them, especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood: adults standing in so-called “bread lines,” children begging in the streets. My grandfather was a New York City cop, and so my dad did not suffer as others did. But he never forgot the brutal scenes and worked hard his whole life to build some financial independence. Fast-forward to the severe recession of 2008, when millions of Americans lost jobs and equity in their homes. No
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BILL O’REILLY
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
bread lines, but much pain. The Obama administration responded by pouring trillions of dollars into stimulus and rescue programs, some of which succeeded in stabilizing tottering banks and auto companies. But along with that,
the president and his acolytes openly encouraged Americans to use the welfare system. And now the entitlement culture has exploded. According to the Census Bureau, more people in America today are on welfare than have full-time jobs. There is a culture of dependency being created that is truly shocking. A recent study by the Cato Institute concludes that welfare now pays more than minimum-wage work in 35 states. So why enter the workforce at the bottom if the government will give you the same compensation for sitting on your
butt? Some believe that the Democratic Party, which champions the entitlement culture, is doing so to assure future votes from those receiving benefits. And right now, about half of all American households are getting some kind of compensation from the feds. Some of that, such as Social Security and Medicare, has been earned. But nearly 50 million Americans are receiving food stamps, and 83 million are on Medicaid. The United States became
blood through the lungs to receive a fresh supply of oxygen. The heart has four chambers. Two chambers, called the atria, receive blood. Two larger chambers, the ventricles, pump blood out to the lungs and the rest of the body. That’s how a healthy heart works. However, disease (particularly high blood pressure and clogged arteries), injury, and years of wear and tear can take their toll. Heart failure is usually a gradual decline in the heart’s ability to pump. Sometimes heart failure begins suddenly, such as when someone has a heart attack that kills a part of the heart muscle. Whether it begins gradually or suddenly, in many cases of
heart failure the muscle tissue in the heart’s left ventricle becomes thin and weak. It can’t contract strongly enough to send suf ficient blood throughout the body. Which brings us to ejection fraction. A low ejection fraction is a defining characteristic of a common type of heart failure called systolic heart failure. An ejection fraction is a measurement of the volume of blood pumped out of the left ventricle each time the heart contracts, expressed as a percentage of the total amount of blood expelled. (I’ve put an illustration of ejection fraction on my website, AskDoctorK.com.) Even a healthy heart doesn’t
See O’REILLY, Page A5
The fast-food giants are accused of keeping their wages low and profits high by intentionally steering workers to sign up for food stamps and other public assistance programs.
The “Fast Food” researchers calculated that the cost to Missouri taxpayers, where about 49 percent of fast-food workers receive public assistance, is about $146 million a year. Post-Dispatch reporter Kavita Kumar wrote Tuesday that Allan MacNeill, a Webster University political economist, said the public cost was probably underestimated. That’s because it did not include managers and people who work fewer than 10 hours a week.
The study also looked at only five of the largest federal public assistance programs, excluding other federal and state programs that would have pushed the figures higher, Mr. MacNeill said.
By under-paying employees, companies push their real cost of doing business onto the public at large. This can be called corporate welfare. Or socialism. But not capitalism.
Fast-food workers should be paid a living wage. The corporations that hire them must stop relying on the public for anything more than buying the occasional burger.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
DEAR DOCTOR K: My husband has heart failure. His doctor often uses the term “ejection fraction.” Can you explain what this means? DEAR READER: Before I explain what an ejection fraction is, let’s say what “heart failure” is, and isn’t. Many of my patients think that heart failure means a heart that stops pumping completely. But that’s not heart failure; that’s sudden death. Heart failure can lead to a range of symptoms, from fatigue and shortness of breath to a buildup of fluid in the body. With heart failure, the heart is still pumping — it’s just not pumping effectively enough to completely do the job the rest of the body needs it to do.
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What is that job? Every cell in the body needs a constant supply of nutrition (sugar, fat and oxygen) and needs to eliminate waste. In that sense, every cell in our body is just like us. The heart pumps nutritionrich blood out to the body, and as the blood delivers the nutrition, it picks up the waste. The heart also pumps
See DR. K, Page A5