Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Sunday warned of an “authoritarian expansion of power” by the Supreme Court after it released several controversial opinions in it’s last week of the term.
“The courts, if they were to proceed without any check on their power, without any balance on their power, then we will start to see an undemocratic and, frankly, dangerous authoritarian expansion of power in the Supreme Court,” Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“Which is what we are seeing now, from the overturning of abortion rights to the ruling that discrimination and, frankly, stripping the full personhood and dignity of LGBTQ people in the United States. … These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,” the New York Democrat said.
Note her argument that the court is centralizing power in itself. A couple of law experts who analyzed the flow of power coming from the radical decisions find a pattern of generally withdrawing power from the executive and legislative branches and from citizen's civil liberties.
Power then generally flows to special interests, including brass knuckles capitalists, Christian nationalists, kleptocrats and the Republican Party itself. The power flows are not precisely controlled, but the general thrust is toward some form of corrupt authoritarianism, corrupt Christian theocracy and corrupt single-party politics dominated by Republican elites.
Thoughts of the day: Always keep eyes fixed on where power flows from and to. Look for winners and losers. Authoritarians rarely or never look for win-win power flow scenarios. They play zero sum politics and look for win-lose scenarios.
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Digital tyranny commentary
Several posts here have focused on the sophisticated, all-encompassing digital tyranny that China has pioneered. Chinese dictators have achieved a relatively complete development and implementation of total digital tyranny. It's not just a matter of putting cameras up everywhere to watch for possible political opposition. The goal of the tyrants is far more encompassing and intrusive.
In China, every cell phone must be trackable for location, purchases and identity of people who communicate or go online to do anything. Every cell phone contains means, e.g., apps, designed to monitor everything and to coerce people to perceive, act and think in support of what the dictators tell them to see, do and believe. Digital tyranny amounts to a vast, sophisticated social engineering project. This is cutting edge cognitive biology and sociology/social behavior science put in service to authoritarianism. There is nothing like this anywhere else on Earth.
The Nazis in 1930s and 1940s Germany would die of envy at what the Chinese have been able to do and are clearly going to do. What the Chinese dictators are trying to do is build a tyranny that cannot be challenged from the inside. It is hard to imagine how the Chinese people could rise up and overthrow the dictators when every move they make and every person they interact with is monitored.
The Chinese Communist Party has gained the ability to spy on more than 100 million citizens via a heavily promoted official app, a report suggests. Analysis of the Study the Great Nation app found hidden elements that could help monitor use and copy data, said phone security experts Cure 53. The app gives the government "super-user" access, the security firm said.The app pushes out official news and images and encourages people to earn points by reading articles, commenting on them and playing quizzes about China and its leader, Xi Jinping. Use of the app is mandatory among party officials and civil servants and it is tied to wages in some workplaces. Starting this month, native journalists must pass a test on the life of President Xi, delivered via the app, in order to obtain a press card which enables them to do their jobs.
On behalf of the Open Technology Fund, which campaigns on human rights issues, Germany cyber-security firm Cure 53 took apart the Android version of the app and said it found many undocumented and hidden features. In its lengthy report, Cure 53 said Study the Great Nation had "extensive logging" abilities and seemed to try to build up a list of the popular apps an individual had installed on their phone.
The app also weakened encryption used to scramble data and messages, making it easy for a government to crack security. "The app contains code resembling a back door, which is able to run arbitrary commands with super-user privileges," said the report.
Adam Lynn, research director at the Open Technology Fund, told the Washington Post, which broke the story: "It's very, very uncommon for an application to require that level of access to the device, and there's no reason to have these privileges unless you're doing something you're not supposed to be."
In China, there is nothing the Chinese government does that it is not supposed to be doing. That's what dictatorship is.
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Digital tyranny update
Putin has taken note of the ongoing advance in dictator tactics and technology in China. Since Putin started his mass murder and destruction campaign in the Ukraine, he has vastly stepped up his efforts to set up his own digital tyranny infrastructure in Russia. The NYT writes:
Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain
Russia is incubating a cottage industry of new digital surveillance tools to suppress domestic opposition to the war in UkraineAs the war in Ukraine unfolded last year, Russia’s best digital spies turned to new tools to fight an enemy on another front: those inside its own borders who opposed the war.
To aid an internal crackdown, Russian authorities had amassed an arsenal of technologies to track the online lives of citizens. After it invaded Ukraine, its demand grew for more surveillance tools. That helped stoke a cottage industry of tech contractors, which built products that have become a powerful — and novel — means of digital surveillance.
The technologies have given the police and Russia’s Federal Security Service, better known as the F.S.B., access to a buffet of snooping capabilities focused on the day-to-day use of phones and websites. The tools offer ways to track certain kinds of activity on encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal, monitor the locations of phones, identify anonymous social media users and break into people’s accounts, according to documents from Russian surveillance providers obtained by The New York Times, as well as security experts, digital activists and a person involved with the country’s digital surveillance operations.
President Vladimir V. Putin is leaning more on technology to wield political power as Russia faces military setbacks in Ukraine, bruising economic sanctions and leadership challenges after an uprising led by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner paramilitary group. In doing so, Russia — which once lagged authoritarian regimes like China and Iran in using modern technology to exert control — is quickly catching up.“It’s made people very paranoid, because if you communicate with anyone in Russia, you can’t be sure whether it’s secure or not. They are monitoring traffic very actively,” said Alena Popova, a Russian opposition political figure and digital rights activist. “It used to be only for activists. Now they have expanded it to anyone who disagrees with the war.”The authorities are “essentially incubating a new cohort of Russian companies that have sprung up as a result of the state’s repressive interests,” said Adrian Shahbaz, a vice president of research and analysis at the pro-democracy advocacy group Freedom House, who studies online oppression. “The spillover effects will be felt first in the surrounding region, then potentially the world.”
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