Monday, October 14, 2019

Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

FAILURE is the condiment that give SUCCESS it's flavour. 
 - Truman Capote
"I went 21 months without a job. I had four kids, I took any job I could get," Forster told the Chicago Tribune in 2018, raising and then lowering his hand to indicate his fortunes. "My career went like this for five years and then like that for 27. Every time it reached a lower level I thought I could tolerate, it dropped some more, and then some more. Near the end I had no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. I was taking whatever fell through the cracks."
 RIP: Robert Forster Dead: Resurgent Oscar Nominee From 'Jackie Brown' Was 78
WWII Lesson for Trump: Turkey Was in Bed With the NazisThe Nazis melted gold dental fillings from concentration camp victims and found the best price for it was in neutral Turkey.At the same time, Turkey kept selling Germany the chromium ore it needed to build weapons and continue the war. But in harkeni...


The real news on ‘fake news’: politicians use it to discredit media, and journalists need to fight back





Bloomberg Tax, IRS Adds Virtual Currency Question to Draft Income-Reporting Form



No More Half-Measures on Corporate Taxes Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate (UserFriendly)
Scientists are decoding the genetic mechanisms of aging PhysOrg 
Tax ombudsman failed me, says ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle - ABC
Andrea Carson, Kate Farhall

THE CONVERSATION

A new study reveals that politicians are only too happy to use the term 'fake news' against the media – to the great detriment of journalism and public debate.


Steven Conn (Miami University), Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools (Cornell University Press 2019):
NothingDo business schools actually make good on their promises of "innovative," "outside-the-box" thinking to train business leaders who will put society ahead of money-making? Do they help society by making better business leaders? No, they don't, Steven Conn asserts, and what's more they never have.
In throwing down a gauntlet on the business of business schools, Conn's Nothing Succeeds Like Failure examines the frictions, conflicts, and contradictions at the heart of these enterprises and details the way business schools have failed to resolve them. Beginning with founding of the Wharton School in 1881, Conn measures these schools' aspirations against their actual accomplishments and tells the full and disappointing history of missed opportunities, unmet aspirations, and educational mistakes. Conn then poses a set of crucial questions about the role and function of American business schools. The results aren't pretty.

 

DOJ Tax New Crime-Fraud Strategy   

I recommend to readers this short introduction to DOJ Tax's recent initiatives for the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege.  Sarah Paul and Daniel Strickland, Tackling the Tax Division’s New Crime-Fraud Strategy (Bloomberg Tax 10/2/19), here. 

A good discussion of the attorney-client privilege and the crime-fraud exception in a current context is in Paul Rosenzweig, Michael Cohen, Attorney-Client Privilege and the Crime-Fraud Exception(Lawfare 4/10/18), here. 

I have written before on the crime-fraud exception.  Here are some key blog entries (in reverse chronological order):

  • Third Circuit Reverses District Court on Application of Work-Product Privilege for Email to Return Preparer (Federal Tax Crimes Blog 1/30/17), here.
  • Update on the Zukerman Indictment - Potential Waivable Conflicts of Interest of Advocate as Witness (Federal Tax Crimes Blog 5/28/16; 6/21/16), here.
  • Second Circuit Affirms Application of Crime-Fraud Exception to the Attorney-Client Privilege (Federal Tax Crimes Blog 10/10/15; 5/24/16), here.
  • Third Circuit on Crime-Fraud Exception to Attorney-Client and Work-Product Privileges(Federal Tax Crimes Blog 12/12/12), here.
  •  




An inside job at the IRS - First, they steal your identity... And then they steal everything else. In the latest manifestation of long-running security problems at the IRS, an employee recently stole several taxpayer identities and went on a 2-year spending spree.
Justin RohrlichReporter at Quartz








The IRS was lambasted four months ago by the Government Accountability Office for not properly safeguarding the personal information of taxpayers—which included leaving taxpayer data vulnerable to employees that shouldn't be accessing it. This is the first known case of an IRS worker stealing someone'sThe IRS was lambasted four months ago by the Government Accountability Office for not properly safeguarding the personal information of taxpayers—which included leaving taxpayer data vulnerable to employees that shouldn't be accessing it. This is the first known case of an IRS worker stealing someone's identity (three identities, in this instance) since the GAO report was released. The staffer, a software engineer in Washington, DC, is 35, and allegedly ran up a $69,000 tab on credit cards opened in unsuspecting people's names. But he was sloppy, and had the cards sent to his own home. Not hard to track down the culprit, which the Treasury Dept.'s internal affairs unit did fairly easily, according to federal court filings. His next court appearance is scheduled for today.

IRS Logo 2It appears that the House Oversight Committee may soon find itself in a renewed fight over the Obama-era IRS targeting scandal, according to a letter from a key House Republican.

In a Tuesday letter sent to U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), obtained by Blaze Media, House Oversight Committee ranking member Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, criticized a pair of House Democrats for renewing a years-old effort to second-guess findings of wrongdoing in the scandal. ... 

Lawfare: “On Oct. 7, the United Kingdom and the United States released the text of the long-awaited data-sharing agreement—the first of the executive agreements envisioned by the CLOUD Act, enacted in May 2018 in order to better facilitate cross-border access to data in the investigation of serious crime. At the time of enactment, there was a heated debate about whether these executive agreements would result in the lowering or raising of privacy and other civil liberties protections—with the two of us taking the position that they held out the promise to induce privacy-enhancing reforms. That argument depended, in part, on nations entering into these agreements and updating—in our view, improving—their laws and practices to meet the CLOUD Act requirements, and the agreements themselves incorporating additional provisions that would ensure key protections are met. This first agreement is critically important, providing not just a window into the U.S. and U.K.’s approach but also presumably setting out a basic blueprint for other agreements that may follow—the European Union has begun discussions over a potential CLOUD Act executive agreement, and this week the United States and Australia formally announced negotiations as well. Notably, the agreement includes a set of additional safeguards not included in the CLOUD Act itself. Congress will now have 180 days to examine the agreement. Absent objection, it will go into effect after that time period. Here we assess what’s new about the agreement; what’s surprising; and why—despite the critics—we continue to view these agreements as positive developments that protect privacy and civil liberties, accommodate divergent norms across borders, and respond to the reality that digital evidence critical even to wholly local crimes is often located across international borders…”

American intelligence follows British lead in warning of serious VPN vulnerabilities
Now if only they'd accept the Queen back again...
The US National Security Agency (NSA) is warning admins to patch a set of months-old security bugs that have recently come under active attack.The NSA's bulletin, issued earlier this week, says that state-sponsored hacking groups are now actively targeting the remote takeover and connection hijacking flaws in VPNs that were first publicized in April of this year."These vulnerabilities allow for remote arbitrary file downloads and remote code execution on Pulse Connect Secure and Pulse Policy Secure gateways. Other vulnerabilities in the series allow for interception or hijacking of encrypted traffic sessions," the NSA warned."Exploit code is freely available online via the Metasploit framework, as well as GitHub. Malicious cyber actors are actively using this exploit code."The NSA's update comes on the heels of an earlier alert issued in the UK by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), warning of attacks that it had spotted against both private and government sector firms in the UK ranging from military and academic institutions to business and healthcare providers.


How journalists get their fix in violent areas


Tijuana “fixer” Margarito Martinez, a photographer himself, helps visiting photojournalists and reporters navigate the complexities of Tijuana, Mexico. (Photo by John Gibbins/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Ever wonder how The New York Times or CNN swoop into a dangerous outpost in a foreign locale and score an interview with a drug cartel hitman or human smuggler?
Chances are, they had help from a journalism fixer.  
Gustavo Solis has a compelling story in the San Diego Times-Union about fixers near the Mexico border, which raises some interesting ethical questions about how journalism is done. 
So what is a “journalism fixer?”
Basically, they are freelance journalists who serve as the eyes and ears for reporters from big publications. Not only do they have their ears to the ground, they can escort reporters around towns to keep them safe because they know the unwritten rules of their regions. They also can set up interviews with sources who might not be easily found or want to talk. They serve as translators, bodyguards, drivers, tour guides and scout locators. But most of all, they serve as fellow journalists, even if they aren’t always treated like them.
These are the people who make it possible for national news outlets to get the stories that make their audiences ask, “How did they get that story?”
These fixers do make decent money for their work — maybe $300 to $450 a day, which is more than most journalists in Mexico make in a week or even a month. However, they rarely, if ever, get credit for their work in the form of a byline. They also are often in danger because they remain in their towns when the big reporters go back to where they came from. 
“It does bother some fixers that they don’t get credit for their work,” Solis told me in an email Tuesday. “After all, most of them are local journalists. Although, some are just stoked to get a call from some of the bigger news organizations so they are happy to do the work without getting credit. I definitely got the sense that the more established fixers would like more recognition and the ones starting out are happy to be involved.” 
They also believe in the work.
“Some fixers are also motivated by a sense of camaraderie with fellow reporters or an opportunity to mentor younger journalists,” Solis told me. “Three of the fixers I spoke with said they’ve accepted less money to work with young reporters through the International Women’s Media Foundation.” 
But it does come with danger. Solis used the example of fixer Jorge Nieto, who was helping a French journalist cover a story about a drug cartel. 
Solis wrote, “If they had gotten kidnapped, the French journalist could’ve called his embassy and it would’ve been an international scandal. But Nieto is Mexican; he lives along the border and therefore would’ve assumed a greater risk.” 
This isn’t just a Mexican story. Journalism fixers work all over the world, including Europe, Russia and, in particular, dangerous places in the Middle East. 
And the work of these fixers is invaluable, even if we never see their names.
Posted by at