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Tuesday, January 28, 2020

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

 From Paul Havel, The Arsonist in the Office: Fireproofing Your Life Against Toxic Coworkers, Bosses, Employees, and Cultures




BRING BACK THE THREE-MARTINI LUNCH, AND BOILERMAKERS AFTER WORK: Most Americans Are Lonely, And Our Workplace Culture May Not Be Helping.

The IRS Decided to Get Tough Against Microsoft. Microsoft Got Tougher.ProPublica
AdamsA federal judge sentenced University of Minnesota financial law professor Ed Adams to two years of probation and $5,000 in fines Thursday for lying to the Internal Revenue Service.
Judge Donovan Frank said Adams deserved a harsher sentence than the one year of probation that prosecutors requested because of his role as a tenured professor who should be setting an example for up-and-coming lawyers.
The Commonwealth Bank is urging the government to consider allowing people to share personal data held by public agencies, saying it could "significantly" cut loan approval times if it had access to Tax Office data.
Canberra urged to join the data sharing action

A father allegedly paid $220,000 to bribe his son's way into the University of Southern California, prosecutors said, then he listed part of the secret payoff as a tax deduction.



A quote from Australia's taxation forefathers, former Federal Tax Commissioner Robert Ewing  “A community which taxes itself properly in order to meet its engagements always has a good reputation.”


Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and poor people they call it “welfare.” The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all to often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem.

The quote and its sentiment reminds me of the White Affirmative Action episode(transcript) of the excellent Seeing White podcast series, in which Deena Hayes-Greene of the Racial Equity Institute asserts affirmative action in America has overwhelmingly favored and benefitted white people.

War on Cash: New York City Businesses Must Accept Cash, City Council Decides


New York City Council passes legislation requiring businesses to accept cash to take effect nine months after signing by mayor Bill DiBlasio

Hacker leaks passwords for more than 500,000 servers routers and IoT devices - ZD Net: “A hacker has published this week a massive list of Telnet credentials for more than 515,000 servers, home routers, and IoT (Internet of Things) “smart” devices. The list, which was published on a popular hacking forum, includes each device’s IP address, along with a username and password for theTelnet service, a remote access protocol that can be used to control devices over the internet. According to experts to who ZDNet spoke this week, and a statement from the leaker himself, the list was compiled by scanning the entire internet for devices that were exposing their Telnet port. The hacker than tried using (1) factory-set default usernames and passwords, or (2) custom, but easy-to-guess password combinations. These types of lists — called “bot lists” — are a common component of an IoT botnet operation. Hackers scan the internet to build bot lists, and then use them to connect to the devices and install malware. These lists are usually kept private, although some have leaked online in the past, such as a list of 33,000 home router Telnet credentials that leaked in August 2017. To our knowledge, this marks the biggest leak of Telnet passwords known to date…


Criminal Tax Evasion and Civil Fraud–If Found by the Trier, Can There be a Reasonable Cause/Good faith Defense 

I have blogged several times on my Federal Tax Crimes Blog about how the “good faith” defense is subsumed in the definition of willfulness for tax crimes.  Willful is the intentional violation of a known legal duty.  If a trier of fact determines that the defendant intentionally violated a known legal duty, then per se that person did not have a good faith defense.  Accordingly, if the trial court in a criminal case where willfulness is an element of a tax crime properly instructs the jury on the willful element, the fact that the judge did not separately instruct the jury that good faith (such as reliance on tax professional) is a “defense” is not error or, at least not reversible error.  Simply put, proof of willfulness negates the good faith defense.  The defendant cannot have intended to violate a known legal duty and then have reasonable cause/good faith in violating that known legal duty.  Accordingly, for example, consider the following:  "[T]o prove willfulness beyond a reasonable doubt, the Government would have to negate the taxpayer's claim that he relied in good faith on the advice of his accountant.”  United States v. Stadtmauer, 620 F3d 237, 257 n. 22 (3d Cir. 2010).

 

 



The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It- The New York Times – “A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says. Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases. Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.

But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew…”

See also MuckRock – (approximately 3 Billion Records) on Clearview AI reveal new info on police use.
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