Direct from the office of South African President Jacob Zuma…
Heh… April Fools’. The positions don’t exist. Heck, the ministries don’t exist.
But several South African media outlets ran with it. “We Fell for It,” conceded the radio and Web outlet EWN.
We have to say we’re impressed. It had the ring of truth. Don’t those sound as if they could be real government agencies — complete with meaningless buzzwords? It’s not like the Ministry of Silly Walks or something that would have been an obvious put-on.
There’s someone — or a group of someones — deep in the bowels of South African bureaucracy who refuses to take himself too seriously.
Would that we could see something like that in the United States…
Yesterday, President Obama signed an executive order declaring “malicious cyberenabled activities” a “national emergency”… and it was no April Fools’.
Near as we can tell, this is the 10th “national emergency” declared by the current president. He’s also extended 22 other “national emergencies” declared by his predecessors. And this doesn’t count garden-variety emergencies like floods or tornadoes.
What does the new declaration mean? “The U.S. will now treat foreign hackers and cyberspies like terrorists and nuclear arms dealers,” Politico reports.
The Treasury Department can freeze their assets and bar them from entering the country. The White House statement didn’t say anything about drone attacks. Maybe that’s being saved for later.
Treating hackers like terrorists? It is “broad brush… at the same time, it’s narrow,” said White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel. We’re suspect Mr. Daniel takes himself very seriously.
Bonus points: The measures can be applied against people suspected of attacks that took place months or years ago. Funny, we thought the Constitution forbade ex post facto laws…
Meanwhile, Big Government is colluding with Big Business to shred whatever vestige of online privacy you still retain.
If you’re a longtime reader with a good memory, you’ll recall in early 2012, Congress was considering something called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. This abomination would have allowed the feds to erase domain names from the Web without due process of law. And it would have been very easy for a website to run afoul of SOPA’s copyright provisions.
SOPA generated a vigorous protest. Sites like Wikipedia and Reddit went dark for a day.
Congress backed off… and got to work right away on a perhaps worse piece of legislation, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA.
Instead of an Internet censorship bill, CISPA was more of an online Patriot Act. As Rep. Ron Paul described it at the time, it would allow companies ranging from Verizon to Facebook “to hand over your private communications to government officials without a warrant, circumventing well-established federal laws like the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.”
It passed the House, but not the Senate. Bullet dodged. For a while…
Three years later, CISPA is back — spiffed up with a new name, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA.
In theory, CISA’s purpose is to help businesses prevent cyberattacks by sharing information about threats with each other, and with the feds.
In practice, “CISA represents a major new privacy threat to individual citizens,” writes Lee Fang at The Intercept. “It lays the groundwork for corporations to feed massive amounts of communications to private consortiums and the federal government, a scale of cooperation even greater than that revealed by [Edward] Snowden.”
Groups ranging from the ACLU to the Competitive Enterprise Institute agree: The bill creates “yet another loophole for law enforcement to conduct backdoor searches on Americans,” reads a joint statement.
But Corporate America is all on board with CISA. Big Business “sees it as a way to cut costs and to shift some anti-hacking defenses onto the government,” writes Fang.
The bill also has a provision granting business broad immunity from privacy lawsuits. So don’t expect to have any recourse in the courts, peon.
More than 30 corporations including 3M and Lockheed Martin have declared their support. So have more than 30 industry associations — everyone from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the American Chemistry Council.
CISA passed the Senate Intelligence Committee during a secret session last month with only one dissenting vote — Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon). Votes in the Senate and House could be only days away.
“Obama is expected to reverse his past opposition and sign it,” Fang reports.
“The reversal,” he says, “comes in the wake of high-profile hacks on JPMorgan Chase and Sony Pictures Entertainment.”
Seriously?
Yes, JPM servers were breached last summer. It was the biggest hack on a U.S. bank to date. And according to The New York Times, the attack “might have been thwarted if the bank had installed a simple security fix to an overlooked server in its vast network.”
And the Sony hack? We called BS on the “North Korea did it” narrative even while the story unfolded late last year. Now every sign points to it being an inside job.
If that’s all the president needs to “reverse his past opposition,” how strong was his opposition to begin with?
It’s at moments like these our thoughts run to the article “In the Year 2024” by our Jim Rickards…
“As I awoke this morning, Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, from restless dreams, I found the insect-sized sensor implanted in my arm was already awake. We call it a ‘bug.’ U.S. citizens have been required to have them since 2022 to access government health care.
“The bug knew from its biometric monitoring of my brain wave frequencies and rapid eye movement that I would awake momentarily. It was already at work launching systems, including the coffee maker. I could smell the coffee brewing in the kitchen. The information screens on the inside of my panopticon goggles were already flashing before my eyes.
“Images of world leaders were on the screen. They were issuing proclamations about the fine health of their economies and the advent of world peace. Citizens, they explained, needed to work in accordance with the New World Order Growth Plan to maximize wealth for all. I knew this was propaganda, but I couldn’t ignore it. Removing your panopticon goggles is viewed with suspicion by the neighborhood watch committees. Your ‘bug’ controls all the channels…”
It was a thought experiment, not a prediction. But it went viral about six months ago. Clearly, it touched a nerve. And in light of current headlines, still does…
[Ed. note: Long before anything like Jim’s dystopian 2024 prophecy might come about, he anticipates another financial crisis — potentially worse than the Panic of 2008.
That’s why he rushed his third book into print less than a year after his second one. It’s called The Big Drop: How to Grow Your Wealth During the Coming Collapse. It’s available only through Agora Financial. If you can spot us shipping and handling, we’ll send it to you free.
If you haven’t claimed your copy yet — there’s one with your name on it — here’s where you can go.]
To the markets today: All the major stock indexes are in the green, with the small-cap Russell 2000 looking strongest.
Traders are weighing several crosscurrents…
- First-time unemployment claims rang in at 268,000 — close to a 15-year low. Tomorrow brings the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly job report, and traders won’t be able to react till Monday — the market is closed for Good Friday
- There’s conflicting word about an Iran nuclear deal. The thinking is any deal that lifts Western sanctions would bring more Iranian oil onto the global market. As we write, traders are betting on a deal — crude is down more than 2%, to $48.92
- And then there’s this… the essence of which is captured on your editor’s iPad. Read the two highlighted alerts from the bottom up…
Now you know why we don’t say much about Greece in The 5 these days. If we see something truly important on the horizon, we’ll let you know…
“I wish I had the time and patience,” a reader writes, “to go through a point-by-point rebuttal of the ‘only government can handle problems’ diatribe in the April Fools’ edition of The 5.
[Heh… We assure you it’s a genuine letter from a genuine reader…]
“It was laced with ‘middle-class sensibilities’ and reminded me of the kind of nonsense I heard in public schools in the 1970s. I understand it has gotten worse since then.
“What I saw was a defense of the position that only government can provide services. The examples selected are services where the private sector can (and does in some areas) provide such services quite affordably. For example, in rural Arizona, if you want fire services, you subscribe to a private fire department, just like you pay a private-sector insurance company for losses due to a fire.
“Many rural areas have private-sector water and sewer utilities that have to maintain their infrastructure (e.g., sewer pipes as well as the treatment facility). When the government exercises eminent domain or otherwise acquires these companies, costs go way up, not down. I have been a beneficiary of such hostile takeovers by the public sector.
“As far as dog catchers, folks out in the country have private-sector means of taking care of menacing animals on private property. No need to involve the government in what is in essence a private-party dispute.
“I could go on, with toll roads, public education, etc. OBTW — my understanding is that many ‘public roads’ are built and maintained by private contractors.”
“Some people are enamored of Big Government, some are not. I am not.”
“The community, any community, is better off if the government is in charge of as little of your life as is possible. It’s a simple metric. Every part of the community that the government controls is
being managed in the least efficient manner possible. That is the reality of government efficiency, it comes in dead last. Therefore, the less that government controls, the better life will be. That’s a simple equation, and I didn’t even do that well in algebra.
“Like any law of mathematics, government involvement in a community can be stated in a simple way. ‘If your goal is to achieve lowest efficiency in any facet of a community, with a maximum waste of resources, human, material and financial, have the government manage that part of the community.’
“It seems rugged individualism and self-reliance are on the decline and have been for some time. That trend coincides with the growing reliance on the government to ‘help’ with more and more facets of life in the USA. More people on the dole probably since the 1930s. Yes, it is by design, government design. Big Government loves to increases the size and scope of reliance on government. It likes to ensure its future viability and essentiality.”
“I am from South Africa,” writes one more reader on property taxes. Guess we’ll end today’s episode where it began…
“Here the politicians pay themselves and their family members more money than citizens earn. I was wondering where did the term ‘public servant’ come from, and does it still apply to politicians today?”
The 5: We turn to the Bard of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, for insight. We presume it applies just as well in South Africa or any other modern democracy as it does the United States.
“The state – or, to make the matter more concrete, the government — consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of 10 that promise is worth nothing. The 10th time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
P.S. As mentioned earlier, U.S. markets are closed tomorrow for Good Friday and The 5 will not publish. We’re back Saturday with our weekly wrap-up 5 Things You Need to Know. The weekday edition of The 5 returns on Monday.
