Owning your own information: How about a Constitutional Amendment?

Celebrities can sue you if you use their likeness or name for promotional purposes without permission, and normally, you must pay a fee to do so. And, you don't get to use that likeness or name again unless you pay again.

So, why shouldn't the law require companies and governments to get your permission to use your likeness—now called "facial recognition"—when they wish to exploit your identity for profit and/or surveillance purposes? In fact, why not require the government to demonstrate probable cause in front of a judge as to why it needs to gather biometric and other data on you and store it?

One hundred fifty-five years ago the United States abolished the right of one human to own another. The principle is that we own ourselves and no one should be able to take that ownership away. So, I'm asking this: If we own ourselves, does that not imply owning the information we need to maintain that ownership, in other words, to be a free person?

This is no idle question in the age of surveillance capitalism. Everywhere the key to controlling others has become controlling information related to them, and that information now includes your movements, your purchases, your habits (at work and at home), your current whereabouts, and anything and everything you put on the internet about yourself. In addition, anything you choose to monitor using "smart" technology will have the providers of such technology looking over your shoulder as you do.

Taking a short break - no post this week

I'm taking a short break from posting this week. I expect to post again on Sunday, January 26.

'Soylent yellow': Is artificial protein really a solution to food production?

The 1973 dystopian science fiction film "Soylent Green" is set in the year 2022, just one year after a nonfictional Finnish company hopes to begin selling an artificially produced yellow protein-laden flour created by bacteria that the company says will revolutionize food production.

The flour is derived from vats of yellow bacteria whose fermentation process create a yellow protein that when dried looks like flour. That yellow flour contains 50 percent protein, 20 to 25 percent carbohydrates and 5 to 10 percent fat. This basic foodstuff can then presumably be turned into products such as meat substitutes, bread products and filler in myriad foods needing a protein boost.

The entire process takes place indoors and the company claims that it dramatically reduces the amount of water, land and other resources needed to grow or raise the equivalent amount of protein using modern farming techniques.

Iran, energy and war

The American obsession with Iran is about oil and natural gas. If these two resources had been absent, it is hard to imagine such an intense American focus on the country from the time of a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency-backed coup of Iran's elected government in 1953 to today. The Foreign Policy magazine piece linked above is based on declassified CIA documents and summarizes the coup this way: "Known as Operation Ajax, the CIA plot was ultimately about oil."

This should come as no surprise. Iran was an oil power back in 1953 and it remains one today. Iran is presumed to have the third largest oil reserves in the world and the second largest natural gas reserves. Even if the numbers cited are somewhat inflated, Iran's reserves are not small, and the country is likely to play a large role in world energy markets for many years to come.

The recent escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran because of the U.S. assassination of a prominent, popular and by all accounts highly effective Iranian general will allow the advocates of war to trot out all manner of excuses for such a war: terrorism, regime change, the credibility of the United States, Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons, and the United States' geostrategic posture vis-à-vis big power rivals such as Russia and China. (Does anyone really know what the last one means?)