Francis Barlow’s woodcut – “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”

Yesterday President Obama nominated his choice for the new SEC Chairman, Mary Jo White.

The President:

As one former SEC chairman said, Mary Jo “does not intimidate easily.”  And that’s important, because she has a big job ahead of her.  The SEC played a critical role in protecting our financial system during the worst of the financial crisis.  But there’s much more work to be done to complete the task of reforming Wall Street and making sure that American investors are better informed and better protected going forward.  And we need to keep going after irresponsible behavior in the financial industry so that taxpayers don’t pay the price.

Her resume as a prosecutor is impressive – on that I do not disagree. After all, she’s the diminutive tough gal who brought down John Gotti and prosecuted terrorists. However, is she really the best person to run the agency charged with rooting out and then prosecuting Wall Street corruption?

Rolling Stone contributor (and brilliant reporter on the financial crisis in general) Matt Taibbi doesn’t think so:

If Barack Obama wanted to send a signal that he’s getting tougher on Wall Street, he sure picked a funny way to do it, nominating the woman who helped John Mack get off on the slam-dunkiest insider trading case ever to cross an SEC investigator’s desk.

I also took the liberty to look up some of the clients Ms. White’s uber-firm, Debevoise and Plimpton, represented. According to Wikipedia, their financial clients included: AIG, American Express, AXA, BNP Paribas, The Carlyle Group, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Kelso & Company, MetLife, Providence Equity Partners, Prudential Financial, and Polyus Gold

Sure, an argument can be made that as someone who defended these Wall Street firms she would be in a unique position to now prosecute them. But even the most un-cynical among us can’t think that is how the confluence of Wall Street and politics works in this day and age. The reality is we have a bi-partisan revolving door that regularly plucks Wall Street hot shots to “serve” for a few years and then they go on (or back) to lucrative jobs at Wall Street firms. (See: Summers, Lawrence; Geithner, Timothy; Paulson, Hank; Rubin, Robert; and so on and so on)

I can’t help but think if George W. Bush nominated someone like this there would be a massive outcry. But that has been the trend of responses to this presidency – things Bush did and drew so much ire from so many now don’t register so much as a blip on those same people’s outrage meter.

It’s hard to stay positive when these surreal episodes keep happening. Not because yet another president nominated yet another wolf to guard the sheep, but because so few people bother to look behind the curtain of the narrative being spun.

nothing to worry about, I’m sure

So Facebook revealed its new search functionality last week to much fanfare. While I understand the power of this data to marketers (and State-run government agencies worldwide), I have a hard time understanding why any person would want this level of search granularity when it comes to their own “likes”, interests and relationships.

Of course I’ve heard about a thousand times,  ”well, I don’t put very much personal info on my profile”. Which is all well and good but then why be on the network in the first place? And for those that do diligently ‘like’ things and keep their profiles chock full of data, will creepy targeted searches like this actually encourage people to REMOVE that valuable personal data?

In other words, is it possible this new powerful Facebook search will encourage people not to share (or actively remove) the goldmine of personal info that makes the search so compelling for marketers?

Disclosure: I quit Facebook about three years ago and can’t stand the fact we have basically the 21st century’s version of AOL in that for an alarming number of people the Internet = Facebook. But that’s a topic for another day and a much longer post.

Today I read Andrew Auernheimer’s ‘iPad Hack Statement of Responsibilty’

From the statement:

In June of 2010 there was an AT&T webserver on the open Internet. There was an API on this server, a URL with a number at the end. If you incremented this number, you saw the next iPad 3G user email address. I thought it was egregiously negligent for AT&T to be publishing a complete target list of iPad 3G owners, and I took a sample of the API output to a journalist at Gawker.

I did this because I despised people I think are unjustly wealthy and wanted to embarrass them. I thought this is the United States of America where we have the right to do basic arithmetic and query public webservers.

I was convicted of two consecutive five-year felonies, and am now awaiting sentencing.

Essentially Andrew is facing 10 years in prison for finding personal, confidential customer information posted publicly on AT&T’s servers and taking the story to Gawker Media to embarrass AT&T. The story got a lot of press at the time and did embarrass AT&T no doubt. But they sure as hell plugged that security hole.

Then there is the well-documented case of internet activist, Aaron Swartz, who sadly killed himself recently. He too was facing the might of the US Department of Justice to the tune of up to 35 years in prison for 13 counts of wire and computer fraud. His crime was basically downloading too many JSTOR articles (academic journal papers) from the open MIT network. He felt research generated wholly or in part with public funds at non-profit universities should not be behind a pay-wall and so was motivated to rectify this.

These are two cases of individuals who, branded repeatedly as “hackers”, were facing disproportionately aggressive prosecutions for actions that at worst, could be considered acts of civil disobedience.

Disproportionate to what?

Well interestingly, Martin Luther King, Jr. during his whole career of activism faced two felonies total and was acquitted of both. Aaron Swartz faced thirteen. Andrew Auernheimer, two, just on the cases outlined above.

Also, how about the fact that AT&T was caught routing every single bit of communication data to a secret closet where it was copied by the NSA without any sort of warrant or judicial oversight. What happened to AT&T for this mother-of-all privacy violations? Congress fell over themselves to pass a law which granted retroactive immunity to AT&T for their illegal activity in assisting the NSA with their illegal activity.

Then there’s HSBC. They were recently found to have laundered money for terrorists, Mexican drug cartels and rogue states unfriendly to the West. Their punishment? A $1.9 billion fine. Or about five or six weeks of profit. And no one is facing any criminal charges.

(What would happen, I wonder, if I gave $100 to a charity even tangentially linked with a group that might itself be tangentially linked to terrorism?)

Then there’s the fact no one in the upper echelons of power faced any criminal charges for the systemic torture we now know occurred. Yet Bradley Manning will likely spend the rest of his life in jail.

None of the Too Big to Fail Banks faced criminal charges for their borderline fraudulent mortgage backed security shell game that brought the world economy crashing down. Instead they got bailouts and interest-free loans from the Fed while individual homeowners were pretty much left to their foreclosures and treated like criminals.

Can you spot the trend?

Surely this has nothing to do with such trends?

Update 1/26: Yesterday John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent and torture whistleblower was sentenced to 30 months in prison for revealing the name of a “covert operative”. This makes him the only person ever convicted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Meanwhile, the people who ordered torture and those who did it remain free and face no consequence whatsoever.

Someone left the cake out in the rain

I love Austin.

I had tried several years ago to maintain a blog of the same name but I had opted to run it on my own hosting platform and frankly, it became a big pain in the ass.

(Or at least that’s what I tell myself today).

But it does seem true: setting up a blog and writing posts seems much cleaner and more intuitive a process now. I’m very impressed with how far WordPress has advanced, in particular.

So, welcome. I hope to post here fairly regularly. Please feel free to add something to the discussion within the comments. All points of view are welcomed. This is my turf though so the comments are moderated for civility.

Here’s a little about who I am.