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The "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is dangerous in a democracy.

There is a great piece about it here: http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/05/14/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-you-have-everything-to-fear/

"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse." — James Madison

then what's the problem with it?

"Why, Even If You Have Nothing To Hide, Government Surveillance Threatens Your Freedom:
The Case Against Expanding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Powers".
'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy.
If you have nothing to hide, you have everything to fear.

Falcon

Based on the officer's statements he did have probable cause for the arrest: the dog alerting in combination with his evasive and uncooperative attitude, it would lead a reasonable person to think he was hiding something.

Since when is being uncooperative an admission of guilt? Since when is it a sign of hiding something? If you have nothing to hide, you have everything to fear.

Falcon

...because of crap like this.... ...because of their secret rooms.. ...because they spied on Americans' emails... ...because they provided the NSA with a database of American's phone calls... ...because they used their influence to lobby Congress to retroactively get immunity and hide their activities... ...because of their former CEO's stated views on Network Neutrality...

I'm telling everyone I know to switch to T-Mobile. I get great 3G reception, they will actually unlock my phone after a couple months, they have great customer support (in my experience), visual voicemail, and they support Android. $25/a month for unlimited internet...

I have NO affiliation with T-Mobile aside from using them for a couple years, and I would invite criticism of them so people can make an informed decision. I'm just sayin... in MHO an iPhone isn't worth AT&T. For anyone on the fence, Android is actually pretty damn great.

Yeah, that was an awkward moment when they were talking about tethering and totally skipped over AT&T, wasn't it?

Well, AT&T had no problem repeatedly, illegally spying on me and selling me out multiple times and then lobbying to get themselves off.

I canceled them as my home service and will never EVER use them again, which precludes an iPhone (for now).

Which is fine, because rooted Android has had tethering (bluetooth & wifi) for a while now.

This could be done by messing with the software that "randomly" chooses what districts to recount.

Or just by not using any software.

You are correct sir, millions, possibly billions, of people will mindlessly put their faces into a google facial database, thus providing Buhs and fascist scum like him with a powerful tool for social control. We will be trading basic freedom for the ability to find pictures of our friends. It is a virtual certainty that by hook or by crook, DHS, NSA and CIA will have those data. More likely the google will just give it to them. They've done it before... "The intelligence community appears to be interested in data mining Googleâ(TM)s vast store of information on each user who uses Googleâ(TM)s services. Google collects data on each userâ(TM)s search queries, which web sites users visited after making a query, and through its Google Analytics service, can also track users on cooperating web sites." http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/02/22/google-in-bed-with-us-intelligence/ -- Not happy with supporting nascent fascism in America, Larry and Sergey are busy helping the Red Chinese. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4645596.stm I can't find anything about this as it seems to have gone down the memory hole, but shortly after 9/11 there were reports that Microsoft was sharing source code with the FBI. Is Windows bugged? Almost certainly. As number 6 said, "Be seeing you!".

If you understand these things and how computers work, you have no choice but to use and advocate free software. Non free software has the ability to end freedom of press and every other right. We are well down that path, with newspapers raided, citizens spyed on, an unpopular war of aggression, torture and other evil things. You can have your privacy with free software and should demand it.

Germany is a place that knows what wiretaps and domestic spying is all about. Everyone's grandfather can tell them what the Nazis did to friend and foe alike. Public display of Nazi symbols is still against the law because it outrages so many. People who lived through the East German Police state have more recent and personal reasons to fear this kind of monitoring. Domestic spying is about eliminating political opposition and the only way to save yourself from that is to run away. Eventually, even those who manage to keep out of sight by doing nothing are destroyed by the schemes of those in power. States that do this are out of control.

If you understand these things and how computers work, you have no choice but to use and advocate free software. Non free software has the ability to end freedom of press and every other right. We are well down that path, with newspapers raided, citizens spyed on, an unpopular war of aggression, torture and other evil things. You can have your privacy with free software and should demand it.

So I believe its fairly clear at this point that there is a general distrust of voting machines in the US. Its also become fairly clear that it would be relatively simple to rig an election where a voter verifiable paper trail isn't present.
While I in no way condone the rigging of an election, I think a good solution to this problem would be to rig an election in a way which would make it obvious that there was a problem. I.E. everyone using a diebold machine wrote in candidate Cowboy Neal for president. The problem is, that most people with the technical expertise, and the motive to rig an election would do so in a way which would make it extremely difficult to track (and probably walk away with a good chunk of change for their effort). Since its virtually impossible to discredit an election where its "pretty close" the only way to show the errors in the system is to exploit them such that it is obvious to the public that they have been hosed.
By the way I live in Colorado, where several voting machines have recently been decertified by our Secretary of State. Interestingly, it wasn't just one manufacturer (in fact only one manufacturer had all their machines successfully recertified), nor one type of machine (both the machines you can vote on, and scantron type vote counters were decertified).
Perhaps other states would be well suited to follow?

While that may be the law, that's not how it usually works out.

Arm Broken at Macy's

Wal-Mart employees kill suspected shoplifter

This security consultant seems to believe there are laws that state you can detain people.

Another opinion citing "International Association of Professional Security Consultants" (IAPSC)guidelines, which seems to agree with the above consultant.

Why cure what you can profit from endlessly? Well it's not quite that, Science cause the plague of Obesity in the from of production methods and economies of scale. Coca Cola was sold in 8 oz bottles as recently as the 1960's. Modern manufacturing made a 16oz aluminum can cheaper then a 8oz glass bottle. While you still see the original Coke bottle shape the size has increased and it's made from unbreakable plastic which like the pop can doesn't break in the machine causing lawsuits.

I drink tea, even iced tea made fresh by me. I can put four spoons of sugar (60 at 2x15 calories per spoonful) in the glass of Iced and it's still a third of the calories in a high fructose corn syrup-sweetened Coke (160 Calories). You can still get real tasting coke, just not in made in the US http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/01/13/coca-cola-preserving-the-myth-of-the-real-thing/

This is the laugher of the day! Why would the feds go through all the expense and hassle of reading your email looking for political dissidents when they could just go to the nearest Code Pink rally or raid the offices of MoveOn.org!!!

It is common knowledge that they used the FBI to dig up dirt on political opponents. Now it is coming to light the they intercepted wireless phone calls of political opponents to listen in. At least this administration lets you know they are doing it.

Since he proposes taking samples from all visitors I expect this will do for the UK tourist trade what fingerprinting has done for the US overseas tourist trade. http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/11/29/entry-t o-us-scares-away-tourism-business/

While there may be local laws that change things, and IANAL, people have lost several similar cases in the past, so there may be an uphill battle here. I know I personally wouldn't convict someone of a BS charge like 'resisting arrest' without some evidence of serious resistance (i.e. bruises or injuries) but beyond that... :[

Dudley Hiibel in Nevada
John Gilmore & his Supreme Court case

Documenting the stupidity that is the TSA, OHS, and related other bureaucratic bunglements.
Warning: learning just how f'ing stupid the government is may cause hilarity, depression, or both.

Hmm, I need some help with this one, since my networking kungfu sucks... When I login to Gmail, I am in a https mode, and this persists through my whole session. I was under the impression, perhaps naively, that this meant my session to Gmail was encrypted and that only I and the Gmail server could decipher the contents of my mail, that is until I click send, and it goes from the Gmail server to wherever I send to. So if this is true, how would someone be able to reassemble my email as I type?

What about before your email gets to Google? Carnivore/Eschelon doesn't care where the email is sent from, it will see it when it goes through AT&T's secret rooms. Use gpg if you actually care about secure email.

AT&T is the same company that cooperates with the government, installing multiple secret rooms used to filter (and store?) your Internet communications. Unfortunately, this isn't some kind of big-brother schizophrenic paranoia.. it's real.

I'm an Apple fanboy myself, but for this reason I canceled my AT&T service and will not purchase an iPhone until they can be unlocked or subscribed with another provider.

More here and here. If you want to watch a Frontline about the domestic survellience program, check it out here.

http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2005/07/02/spanish -american-war-tax-on-telephone-service-continues-t oday/ Spanish-American war, actually.

It's probably accurate.

From a report back in January;

The National Security Agency has provided assistance to Microsoft and Apple in securing their Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, according to a report published Tuesday.
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2007/01/09/nsa-pro vided-security-help-for-windows-mac-os-x/

For what it's worth, the SELinux extensions came from the NSA, so they've had a hand in improving security for all the major platforms. Linux is the only one where the code's visible for the paranoid though.

Hopefully they mention this in the book, but just in case:

Bad behavior: kills 99% of all spam on contact
Spam Karma: kills the other 1%

You mean tomatoes.

The Constitution was not made to protect criminals but to prevent the Government from becoming criminals.

Yeah, but if you just change your reading of the Constitution, then you can do whatever you want! It's just a goddamn piece of paper, right?

Get Connected and head to http://ipv6links.net to find some sites that are available via IPv6.

Homeland Stupidity is a great ipv6-connected blog that many Slashdotters would probably like.

A quick Google discovers that they are terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers.

Do you really think that the obviously absurd expectations and low level of training exhibited by the campus cop(s) involved is an indication of what "police" (as in, "all police") do?

Since we could have heard about this from NY, or FL, or LA, and this particular one just happened to occur on a college campus - Yes, I'd say this does reflect the generally brutish quality of police in general.



Have you suddenly stopped seeing the firing of cops caught doing this sort of thing?

Better question - Have you suddenly started seeing cops fired for shit like this? Departments cover it up as much as possible, the cowards hiding even their names behind their "LEO's Bill of Rights"; When it makes the press, the chiefs talk about investigations and appropriate discipline, then give the offending cops a few weeks of paid vacation.

Rodney King, Humboldt County (Earth First vs Pacific Lumber Co), the present example... And do cops go to prison for grossly abusing their authority? Hell no! Given one cop testifying against two dozen dirty hippies, the courts show just a wee bit of bias there...



how we'll be treating all students that refuse to show ID in an area where you have to show ID.

Trespassing does not negate your basic human rights, nor the responsibility of the police to act humanely and with as little force as the situation requires. Some punk taking a bit longer than they want to pack his books up does not justify tasering.



we were talking about someone having captured video of a person (without ID) who got into a secured part of the campus and assaulted a student.

A college campus doesn't count as a war zone. You don't have a "Green zone" where you only expect to see familiar white faces, and if you want to survive to see tomorrow you must view anyone unfamiliar as carrying a bomb. This didn't happen in Baghdad, it happened on a goddamned American college campus.

Get a sense of scale, here! 9/11 did not change everything, regardless of how those who want an authoritarian government may spin it.



In your imaginary, rhetorical "police state," you wouldn't be having this conversation.

Chinese and Egyptian students keep blogging, regardless of the risk.

But
that
doesn't
happen
here,
right?

It depends somewhat on where all that data goes, how people are screened, etc.

I did a bit of digging into this story yesterday, and found it's at least partially true, but he missed the really good stuff.

By giving up liberty, we may be safer from terrorists, but we are less safe from our government, causing us to have neither Liberty nor Safety.

Use Bad-Behaviour and mod-security.

These two work perfect for me.

4. Finding: From at least 1994, and continuing into the summer of 2001, the Intelligence
Community received information indicating that terrorists were contemplating, among
other means of attack, the use of aircraft as weapons.

He[Sarshar] had first-hand information of prior specific warning obtained from a reliable informant in April 2001 on the terrorist attacks of September 11.

"...when hundreds of American bodies are laying[sic] around you will question whether there was anything else that could have been done. " -- Richard Clarke, memo to Rice, 9/4/2001

As I said in my own post about this yesterday (which somebody ripped off) it's security theater. All this is meant to make people feel safe, not to make them actually safe.

i remember that Brazilian electrician killed in the UK. Charles Menezes Police 'faked Tube death log' Special Branch 'altered record' in attempt to switch the blame for de Menezes shooting By Sophie Goodchild, Chief Reporter Published: 29 January 2006 Extraordinary allegations that Special Branch officers deliberately falsified vital evidence to hide mistakes which led to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes at a south London Underground station were made last night According to claims in the News of the World, police altered the contents of a logbook, which detailed the Brazilian electrician's final movements, in a bid to cover up their blunders. http://team8plus.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_view topic.php?590.30 and its happeing all over the US. maybe not with deaths, and not as apparent, but the same type thing. How many planes have been forced down due to a terror alert ? how about they guy who was mentaly ill, and was waving his arms ? He was shot and killed , i doubt that would have happened if the US wasnt shouting TERROR TERROR at every step. WHat gets me, is stuff like not letting liquids on planes. i doubt that will help a damn thing. http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/08/21/dangero us-banned-liquids-given-to-homeless/ Dangerous banned liquids given to homeless Just look at New Orleans. I was here during the hurricane. I had a police scanner hooked to my 12v car battery, nothing better to do for 3 days than listen. the local cops and emergency people KNEW what to do. we have been through this many times on a small scale anayway. The local cops said they felt like stepchildren you can read what i wrote here... Hurricane Katrina A hospital needed deisil for a generator, but could not get it, because DHS had not signed off on it yet. I heard the whole thing live. In Metairie, where i am from, DHS took down the antenna for the emergency personel. Did not bother to tell them. No one knew why communications were out. People could have died (and might have) because of this. The whole thing was a botch job it was like a buch of clowns on fire, trying to juggle shotguns and chainsaws. (excuse the visual) DHS wasnt there, and no one could contact them, but no one could PEE without their buy-off. FEMA came in and "acquired" or "comandeered" what they needed. we dont need no stinking badges. FEMA REFUSED help. I hear, over the scanner, most of this was due to not knowing who was in authority I had freinds that were nurses, that tried to offer their help, and were turned away. I heard about lots of stories like this ... http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArt icle&code=NIM20050911&articleId=929 OK, i might have got a bit off topic, but... The whole bungleup was due to DHS taking over. I cant begin to tell you how money was just thrown helter skelter at this it wasnt ust sad, it was sickening. Heres an account of racism (off topic) but if your interested. Yes, racism was prevelant during this disaster... I know Malik from the Gree Party here in NO... http://uruknet.info/?p=15572&hd=0&size=1&l=x Brad http://911review.org/ http://911review.org/Hurricane_Katrina http://911review.org/Hurricane_Katrina/photos/

Microsoft forgot to mention my non-content based method of blocking comment spam entirely known as Bad Behavior. And now that they seem to have swiped a few of my ideas, I'm going to have to go see what they're up to...

Let the BDS posts begin ... You guys really need to grow up and start thinking.

• Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? Nope.
• Saddam has links to al Qaeda? Nope.
• Katrina victims will receive the support they require in a timely fashion? Nope.
• US citizens will only be spied on using a court order? Nope.

They've made another thread for it here on homelandstupidity.us. I guess that blows the groups-as-area-codes idea out of the water, then...

http://atlanta.craigslist.org/mis/170018379.html

Found it at http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/05/31/the-212 -796-0735-mystery/

If this is a joke, someone's going to some serious lengths to make sure nobody gets the punchline...

My own weblog was recently hit by comment spam. I was extremely irritated, and initially considered captchas as a potential solution. But several problems with captchas ultimately lead to me seeking alternate solutions.

The first problem with captchas is the barrier it puts up, however small, between you and the users of your site. Apologies for the corney analogy, but captchas are a speedbump on the information superhighway. People hate running into them.

The impediment to visually disabled users is also a big one to consider. It's not just fully blind people. People can be shortsighted, colour blind, dyslexic or perhaps simply shortsighted users relying on specialist software to read your website. You're letting these people down by adopting this practice and that's something I would really feel bad about doing.

But the biggest reason not to use captchas is spammers increasing abilities to interpret them. At even a five percent success rate in interpreting captchas, a spammer can bombard your site with requests and still get something through. They're just using the same model as they did with email, and it will work.

Instead I chose some other plugins available for Wordpress to help with the spam. Akismet sounds like it could work as a kind of distributed spam check/blacklist of sorts, though I am wary of the fact that a private company is running the service. I also installed Bad Behaviour, though it's clear that eventually some spammers will adapt their behaviours to this.

Ideally what I'd like is a true bayesian comment spam filter plugin for wordpress, but so far I haven't been able to find one. Such filters have done wonders for me in Thunderbird for my email spam, with something like a 99.99% sucess rate and no false positives. Clearly the situation is quite different with comment spam, but all the same it would be nice to have one.

I envisage that the comment spam situation will get a lot worse as time goes by, regardless of any pagerank type algorithm changes. Comment spam will no doubt become as ubiquitous as regualar spam and I can forsee dozens of "splog" post per day in the not too distant futre. My opinion is that Blog software should come with robust, adaptable and self updating anti-spam software on by default before this problem escalates out of control.

Nofollow was a hare-brained idea from the start, cooked up over a couple of apparently drunken (or perhaps stoned) nights between developers at Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

You can't vote for any other party! The wrong lizard might get in!