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Also: civil forfeiture.
It is apparently common practise, and entirely legal, for police forces to sieze the assets of private individuals, with not so much an accusation of a crime having been committed. They can then be threatened with (very expensive to defend) felony charges if they don't "voluntarily" "donate" the siezed asset to the police themselves.

Yes. What's your point? Since they were created we've known that's what the FBI is up to.

The DHS is the enforcement arm of the "national security" secret police, so the FBI is moving up in the world. The DHS is already showing up a ball games, I wouldn't be surprised if they start replacing local cops -- Or, those offices just get re-branded, they're already being militarized. Anything to don the prestigious cloak of national secrecy.

Kind of makes the NSA redundant though, eh? Nothing to worry about though, eh? They're not checking for our "papers, please", they're just building dossiers on everyone of us just in case.

Amy Davidson of The New Yorker completely deconstructs the entirety of Fred Kaplan's argument.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2014/01/did-edward-snowden-break-his-oath.html

It should of course be mentioned that nearly all of these can be had for free from Project Gutenberg, and probably Goodreads and Google Books as well. There is no excuse any more to have not read them.

That's a good point. Actually, some of the more recent books went back into copyright under the Micky Mouse copyright extension act. James Joyce only went into public domain in 2012. http://joycefoundation.osu.edu/joyce-copyright/fair-use-and-permissions/about-law/public-domain http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/01/james-joyce-public-domain.html

But the idea of having the entire Great Books on a Kindle that weighs less than a Modern Library Giant Edition is awesome.

I think (long) this article provides the right background.

Thin Thread

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread

http://www.whistleblower.org/program-areas/homeland-security-a-human-rights/surveillance/nsa-whistleblowers-bill-binney-a-j-kirk-wiebe

Binney.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2013/06/takes-the-nsas-surveillance-programs.html

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_whistleblower_william

http://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/

Reinstate him as DNI.

And, while I agree that the ATF has badly bungled the whole Waco fiasco, I have zero compassion for <strike>religious nuts</strike human beings.

I fixed that for ya, bud. With all respect, please take your demonization and arrogant intolerance, and stuff it.

I don't know if Mr. Ulbricht's bitcoins have been improperly seized or not, but I do know that property is seized all the time in the US from people who have not been found guilty of a crime. Funny, I don't find authorization for anything of the kind in my copy of the Constitution. In fact, mine says "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".

But I rather expect your conception of due process of law is rather different than mine.

LOL, you've never heard of civil forfeiture, have you?

Raising children well can take about as much time as most adults can put into it. Our US society is currently suffering for too much parental time put into work and then other distractions. and not enough time spent with kids. The same goes for the effort reuired to maintain social relations with freidns and neighbors. That is historically way most human adults spent most of their time -- raising kids and being social. For reference on a hunter/gatherer lifestyle:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

I readily agree that people need a sense of "agency" -- that they are accomplishing things to make their life better. But whether that needs to be withing a structured system of economics we call "work" entailing bosses and customers and "wage slavery" is a different question (even if most of us practically have few other short-term alternatives to work).
http://www.whywork.org/

Related to you point, many people like playing a hunter/gatherer in an abundant Minecraft world a lot. Yet, maybe part of that is indeed because of the abundance and the possibilities? Yet, in US society, many people are arbitrarily shut out from all the abundance. This kind of stuff (or the need for it) is just wrong in such a wealthy society:
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2009/08/07/6958/appalachian-fairgrounds-charity-tries-fill-gaps-health-care
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/22/demographic-shift-puts-american-dream-out-reach/

If "welfare is a fast road to unhappy dependency", then:
A. Why do rich people tend to give their children lots of expensive things including Ivy League educations, good cars, condos, trust funds, and so on?
B. Would you turn down a million dollar cash gift?
C. Do monthly "Social Security" payments to any citizen in the USA over age 65 cause enormous distress to the elderly?

If you think about these three questions, you may find a missing piece of the puzzle of a picture of the future.

However, your point about the cost of living going down is indeed true and needs to be kept in mind. On the other hand, decreasing costs also generally implies less money going to fewer people. But the marketplace only "hears" the needs of those with cash. If you have zero money, then you can't afford a place to sleep or put your stuff. And further, automation tends to concentrate wealth (at least initially).
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

Productivity has doubled or triples over the last few decades in the USA, but real wages for most workers have remained flat (granted, health insurance benefits have increased, but it is not clear people are that much healthier for that). That is a political issue about fairness as well as power.

I'd agree humans want interaction with other humans (generally), but whether that is best in the context of payments (as opposed to gifts or family and friend interactions) is another question. For example, I prefer to have my wife cut my hair than to go to a barber or hair salon.

Another thing to consider is that perhaps all humans have some claim on some of the fruits of the commons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

BTW, on NYC homeless:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/10/28/131028fa_fact_frazier?currentPage=all

It sounds there like the "means testing" and uncertainty and constant changes create much

Is this news? The Decline Effect has been known about (and generally ignored) for years.

Doped up in a hospital bed his wounds became infected, requiring another surgery.

Not quite on-topic, but one discussion of checklists and complexity describes modern medical intensive care, and includes a story that prominently features infection issues.

a) Have actually proven that this is not some 'cook something up to to get our ultra conservative readers their daily dose of outrage over their morning coffee' type story made up by a right wing rag.

I can't speak to the specific case, but if you think civil forfeiture is a figment of the right-wing imagination, you're dangerously ignorant about how the government operates.

It's been going on for decades, under both Democratic and Republican leadership. Basically, the state or federal government uses an obscure legal doctrine under which it accuses your property of a crime. Your property doesn't have the same due process and presumption of innocence rights you do, so it usually lose the case. You have to sue the government to get it back. You can guess how well that usually goes.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/easy-money-civil-asset-forfeiture-abuse-police

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/civil-asset-forfeiture

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2010/02/take_the_money_and_run.html

http://fear.org/victimindex.html

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman

http://www.forbes.com/2011/06/08/property-civil-forfeiture.html

Who you meet for coffee, etc. Actually, that is the objective. Find who you meet for coffee.

Actually no. The objective is find where d'you get that coffee.

No. The people who made money off the Twitter IPO are not the ones who bought at the IPO price. The people who made money were the ones who *sold* at the IPO price: namely, as the YouTube bears say, teh Goldmansachs. See http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/11/who-gained-from-twitters-underpriced-ipo.html. In other news, the people who made money off the gold rushes of the nineteenth century were the ones selling shovels.

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"

I don't think so.

Once Upon a Time in America

Cheap communications has changed our society more than any other of our inventions and it has removed more tyrants from power than any weapon. Let’s take another step into the history books, back to May 1st, in 1844. Alfred Vail, working with Samuel Morse, was setting up the first telegraph line, and on that day sent the world’s first ever electronic message down the 24 miles of cable that were working, from Annapolis Junction to Washington D.C., to report the results of the Whig Party presidential nominations (Henry Clay won that nomination, and lost the subsequent election).

Just a decade later in 1855, the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company and the New York & Western Union Telegraph Company merged to create Western Union. One assumes new-york-and-mississippi-valley-and-western-union-printing-telegraph-company.com was already taken by domain name squatters.

By 1900, Western Union operated a million miles of telegraph lines, and by 1945 it had an effective monopoly over the US market. As the New Yorker wrote, monopolies make spying easier. It is an easy and obvious trade: the government allows, by inaction or by intervention, a powerful telecommunications company to become dominant in a market through mergers and acquisitions. In return that company provides the government with surveillance.

The New Yorker explains how Western Union used its monopoly to serve those in power:

What we now call electronic privacy first became an issue in the eighteen-seventies, after Western Union, the earliest and, in some ways, the most terrifying of the communications monopolies, achieved dominion over the telegraph system. Western Union was accused of intercepting and reading its customers’ telegraphs for both political and financial purposes (what’s now considered insider trading).

Western Union was a known ally of the Republican Party, but the Democrats of the day had no choice but to use its wires, which put them at a disadvantage; for example, Republicans won the contested election of 1876 thanks in part to an intercepted telegraph. The extent of Western Union’s actions might never be entirely known, since in response to a congressional inquiry the company destroyed most of its relevant records.

It is quite visible how cost gravity drove communications down from an experiment for the wealthy to a mass market product so cheap even Western Union couldn’t make profits from it. By 1980 its telegraph business was dying, and the old Western Union business was finally closed in 2006, after 151 years of operation. The name was, as we know, reused for a financial services company which today enjoys a government-sanctioned monopoly.

Curiously, Western Union’s long telegraph monopoly seems to have had only a small impact on the size of communications networks. If cost gravity was operating fully, at 29% a year, and telegraph costs were in free-fall, there would have been 37M miles of telegraph by 1900. Instead, assuming Western Union had half the market, there were 2M miles. That is a factor of 16 over 55 years, which is not much, and a part of that can be accounted for by quality improvements.

I’m also not sure what to do with the random figure of 113 million kilometers of fiber optic cable produced in 2010. A cable is a bundle of fibers, and the traffic rates are rather higher than Western Union’s old stock. Has cost gravity been working?

One smoking gun pointing to a century and half of cost gravity being hijacked by telecoms monopolies back through AT&T and Western Union is the cost of the modern equivalent of a telegraph, the text message.

See Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer to get a truer sense of the depth and breadth of the machinations.

Also, because LEDs come to full brightness faster than sodium lamps, it raises the possibility of using motion sensors to turn them on only when needed, reducing light pollution and energy usage.

Meanwhile, there's some debate about whether street lights reduce crime. They create dark pockets where attackers can hide, and the illumination they provide helps burglars see what they're doing.

I swear that after the shoe bomber got them to make us take off our shoes, the underwear bomber was sent in to see if they'd strip search us. (And they responded with backscatter scanners. Discuss.)

Yeah, there were even people who predicted that this would happen.

Just the fact that there were 55 different contractors working on healthcare.gov is reason enough to suspect that major security flaws crept in.

The fact that the website was opened before any appreciable amount of testing was done is reason enough to suspect that most of those flaws are still undiscovered and uncorrected.

The government's project managers didn't even come up with a full specification for the largest contractor until this past Spring, with the expectation that everything would be done and ready for business on 1 October. It's a total clusterfuck, the true scope of which likely won't be discovered for several months.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/why-the-healthcaregov-train-wreck-happened-in-slow-motion.html

It's like exercise for your brain, and a great waste of money! http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/brain-games-are-bogus.html?mobify=0

You must be looking at a different Wikipedia than I am.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

"Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[16] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.[17]" Emphasis mine

Let's go one step further:

Source: http://www.ask.com/question/is-wire-fraud-a-felony

"Yes, wire fraud is a felony as it has been considered a federal crime in the United States since 1872. The punishment can be up to 20 years in prison."

I don't really know what else to say. This was on account of the whole JSTOR thing. In case you've been under a rock, here's a freebie: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/fixing-the-worst-law-in-technology-aaron-swartz-and-the-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act.html.

The graph you are referring to is probably one similar to the first one shown in this New Yorker article. A few months back there were a number of articles about this this and this one happened to be the first one I came across. The peak for inflation adjusted minimum wage in the US was in 1968 which was worth about $10.56 in today's dolalrs. Since then it has been in a downward trend with spikes each time it has been increased. Also of note is how much inflation has devalued the dollar in the following 45 years because it appears that $10.56 in today's dollars was worth $1.60 in 1968 or to simplify our money is worth about 1/10 of what it was then.

But they really need to factor in context, multiple meanings, and especially other factors that might lead to high frequencies of their chosen "emotional" words, like proper names or other plot points that may not actually be representative of the vocabulary and emotions of the story overall.

You are correct. Obviously this sort of text analyzer is still in its infancy. It would be interesting to throw some oddball stories at it and see the results. E.g., here's a story filled with unpaired words. I wonder what it would say its "emotional temperature" was? And of course the program would totally miss the humor. (Note that the New Yorker blew the formatting when they put this online, and that the actual story starts with the third sentence: "It had been a rough day....")

It is appalling to see so many people blaming users for the results of a policy Americans keep voting for. This is a public health outcome of the "War on Drugs", which, like any other war on a thing, is really just a war on people.

Blaming addicts is a craven political tactic used by powerful incumbents to protect their incomes: Local and federal law enforcement agencies who's funding depends on drug prohibition, privatized prisons and their lobbies, grandstanding politicians who campaign on "getting tough" on things, and gangsters and smugglers all have a vested interest in the status quo. The outcome cannot improve until we refuse to be duped, demand reform.

Desperate users who are already opioid addicts are exploited by sellers of krokodil, they are not normal healthy people who "choose to try it". It is unreasonable to assume that users of this substance have given informed consent to be poisoned; they do not enjoy the same autonomy that you and I do, they are desperate, and they are not easily able to evaluate the quality or authenticity of black market drugs.

Drug prohibition is economically nonsensical. It is an explicitly stated aim of law enforcement to increase the street price of narcotics. Therefore, prohibition incentivizes the black market and makes users less safe and more desperate. Black market opioids are expensive and contaminated _because_ they are criminalized, and the desperation of addicts is exacerbated by our policy. We have deliberately created a situation where heroine costs $250 per gram and addicts must choose between getting DT's and robbing houses.

Drug prohibition is predicated on the ideas that narcotics diminish our autonomy, and that we are all susceptible to addiction to some degree. It is incoherent to support prohibition and blame addicts at the same time. It's also hypocritical. How many of you have consumed a pharmaceutical opioid or other narcotic, and thereby chosen to risk addiction?

We are not morally or intellectually superior to addicts. Moreover, blame is no solace to the millions of people who are imprisoned, killed by gangsters, or poisoned, and it is cruel, pedantic, and beneath us... oh wait, this is slashdot.... but seriously:

Even if we don't care an iota for the welfare of drug users, we ought to resent the fact that we are footing the bill for a colossal boondogle which is perverting our legal system, and destabilizing neighboring states.

Krokodil is a market outcome of drug prohibition. We should stop voting for it.

Bloody university PR departments presenting every research project as if it's some Eureka moment.

"For over a decade, cookstove experts and enthusiasts have gathered at Aprovecho [Research Center]". In 2009 The New Yorker had a long article about stove enthusiasts designing better stoves, what's changed since then? The Chinese are already cranking out Rocket stoves in volume; other commenters have linked to www.cleancookstoves.org, Biolite, etc.. The problem isn't engineering, it's economics and cultural.

Meanwhile, any stove still requires spending hours collecting firewood, contributing to deforestation and CO2 emissions. As an adjunct people can put food in a black pot in an insulated container heated by a cheap solar reflector. But now you've got two $20 purchases per family, one of which only works part of the time. Meanwhile the U.N. spends millions trucking fuel into refugee camps. Again, the problems are NOT engineering ones.

The Yahoo CEO is not thinking of the best interests of whom they are supposed to serve and the Yahoo! way of doing business pretty much reflects that.That is why I am glad they are losing marketshare. If you want an example of someone who gets it right, please read this interview with Archive.org founder, Brewster Kahle. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/06/what-its-like-to-get-a-national-security-letter.html In a nutshell, the government tried to intimidate him into acting against the peoples' best interests and he resisted. Rightly so. Mind you, Archive.org is all about public service whereas Yahoo! is clearly not. Dear Yahoo!, don't be evil.

Monsanto

Saying "this book has to sell for at least $X" is actually considered a form of price fixing when you're working with a wholesale model. That's why the "S" in "MSRP" stands for "suggested", rather than being an "R" for "required". In fact, Apple has run into that issue with their electronics, since premium pricing is part of their brand image, yet it's difficult to enforce it without running afoul of antitrust legislation.

And regarding my assertion, I think there may be a misunderstanding, since some of what you've said is inapplicable to the time period I was talking about.

In referencing wholesale prices, I hoped to make it clear that I was referring to the time back when wholesale pricing contracts still existed between Amazon and the publishers. Amazon stopped using wholesale pricing with the publishers in early 2010 (largely because of the strengthened positions the publishers gained as a result of Apple's entry into the space). This was before the iPad was announced, so Apple was not a player in the space at the time, though this was the time when they were working out backroom deals with the publishers.

My assertion was that Amazon controlled the wholesale prices by virtue of being a monopsony, which should be readily apparent, given that at the time (and even now) they were by far the largest purchaser of eBooks from publishers (citation: "In 2009, Amazon’s market share for e-book sales was nearly ninety per cent"). Essentially, no one else was buying eBooks wholesale at anywhere close to the volume they were, so they could dictate prices, since the only alternative the publishers had was to tank their own sales by only putting them up for sale on the 10% market share Nook. I wish I could cite something more, but other than their overwhelming market share, I don't know how else I could cite the fact that they had a strong position from which they could negotiate pretty much any price they wanted.

The arrival of Apple on the scene helped to break Amazon's grip by introducing a platform that was sure to have a massive installed based, and that allowed the publishers to take a stronger stance in their next round of negotiations with Amazon in early 2010, letting them work out agency deals that put the control of prices back in their own hands. The agency model came at a higher cost to them, since the piece of the pie the retailer took was larger than what they received at that time under the wholesale model, but it ensured that the size of the pie wouldn't shrink to the point where the publishers couldn't survive.

I can't believe the summary mentioned Khalid Sheik Mohammed without mentioning that he's not just any trained engineer -- he designed a classified vacuum cleaner .

Sheesh...and they call this "News for Nerds"....though come to think of it all the true nerds already knew this!

I for one do not trust our governments to tell me the truth, or engage in wars unless necessary anymore.

Hey! Where's your patriotism? Remember the Maine! Remember the Lusitania! Remember the Maddox! Remember that Saddam was an evil man who had used WMDs and since al Qaeda was led by an evil man it clearly follows that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda. Why would you ever doubt an administration's casus belli?

I don't think these people are doubting that vaccines work. Rather they are more afraid of their kids having autism than measles. And they don't understand that vaccines don't cause autism.

I think many have this false belief due to (at least) one now widely discredited study published proposing this link - this/these ideas are still pushed by some people and celebrities, like Jenny McCarthy.

From Anti-Vaccine Body Count:

The United States Anti-Vaccination Movement is composed of a variety of individuals ranging from former doctors who should know better, to semi-celebrities who have no medical training, to anti-government conspiracy theorists who distrust anything that the government says.

• Number of Preventable Illnesses: 120,487
• Number of Preventable Deaths: 1,283
• Number of Autism Diagnoses Scientifically Linked to Vaccinations: 0

Unfortunately, some people would rather believe that some *thing* - the vaccination - caused their child to "get" Autism rather than living with the understanding that it was genetic - and came from them.

It's just starting here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman?printable=truetPage=all

If you just give us all your money, you can get your kids back...else...foster homes.

Because there are two completely separate issues, in both fact and law, which have nothing to do with each other.
1. Snowden had a clearance, and violated it. He signed contracts, and broke them. The facts are clear on this side.
2. Snowden was disclosing illegal acts, which would *seem* to come under whistleblower protection . . . if maybe he were disclosing a company dumping toxic waste . . . but if the legal system itself is doing something, how can it be illegal? (My answer is "of course it can", but I don't work in the legal system.)

Read the New Yorker article on civil forfeiture and see how police departments all over the country are stealing people's property. Oh, sorry, I mean "remanding as evidence". We should all be more vigilant about ALL levels of government. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman

What most people don't realize is Obama is as much a republican as Reagan, Nixon, and both Bushes. His policies are in direct line with theirs.

About the only policies of President Obama that are in something like a "direct line" from the previous administration are the general form of some of the anti-terrorism policies. That is a result of a general political consensus among the President and Congress that allowing terrorists to kill large numbers of American citizens is a bad thing. Many on Slashdot question that political consensus for some reason, usually related to traffic accidents. I expect they would also question the wisdom of declaring war against Japan in 1941 since 13 times more Americans died in traffic accidents than were killed at Pearl Harbor, and polio was still a scourge. Hmmm

We didn't need the cabinets before World War II Why don't we eliminate them?

Presidents certainly did have cabinets before WW2. Here is President Wilson's cabinet, for example.

This is why so many property seizure/shakedown cases from the police have the officer saying he "smelled pot" after he stopped the car. He never found any, and never had any reasonable suspicion there was some, but he would say there was a smell of pot in the car, so he seized the property in it. A car smelling "too clean" was another reason.

This New Yorker article is a depressing read.

We are still learning about the climate; we know enough, probably enough to say that pumping CO2 into the air is not a good idea and is likely the cause of climate change, but not enough to consider all the options and determing a geoengineering fix yet. But, people _are_ working on it.

For more information about US forfeiture law abuse see this amazing article from The New Yorker last week.

SWAT team raids for petty offences

The police holding kids for ransom

I mean F it. Why don't we wear burkas and execute women drivers while we are at it. Shit.

There was an article on alcoholism and cultural norms that I read a couple of years ago in the New Yorker: "Drinking Games: How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it." Going from memory, the idea was that there is a genetic component to alcoholism. However, whether or not someone with this predisposition actually becomes an alcoholic has much to do with the "rituals" behind alcohol consumption in one's society. That seems to explain why some countries have higher rates of alcoholism ("problem drinkers" who screw up their lives) than other countries. I think it's a broader application of the same idea behind what you're describing. Social setting seems to matter.

I think civil forfeiture is the flavor of "pre-crime" that is the bigger problem in terms of likelihood of it affecting the average person (although I don't deny that extraordinary rendition is also a problem).

You don't like the sites I linked to? Do they not conform to your ideological stance? Did you bother to actually read them or were your ideological lenses too deeply tinted?
Try this one from the New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/06/darrell-issa-vanishing-irs-tax-scandal.html
Are you really so naive as to think that a lawsuit filing contains only the unvarnished truth?
Do lawyers habitually include details that support or exonerate the other party?

Because the locals don't appreciate it when it happens with locals. And when it is "consenting" co-members of the military it can often be less than consenting and it creates unnecessary conflict in a unit.

Too many of these posts have cut right to the edge of what has been said by the mayor of Osaka.

''When soldiers are risking their lives by running through storms of bullets, and you want to give these emotionally charged soldiers a rest somewhere, it's clear that you need a comfort-women system.'' he told reporters. ''Anyone can understand that.'' Japan's obligation, he said, is 'to politely offer kind words to the comfort women'' ---- as if they are to be pitied, prostitutes for whom politeness would be a prize; as if they had been lowered, rather than the Japanese military debased.

Hashimoto compounded that built-in controversy by suggesting that other countries might not only understand but emulate the Japanese experience --- that the United States might do so immediately at its bases in Japan: ''We can't control the sexual energy of these brave Marines ... They must make more use of adult entertainers.''

....what needs to be challenged is a basic complacency about linking soldiers and sexual violence. This is an issue that afflicts many war zones and militaries, including ours, where there is an unresolved crisis of sexual assault. There is also something telling in Hashimoto's muddling of wartime sexual servitude, prostitution, peacetime assaults on the streets of Okinawa, and ''adult entertainment.''

The Mayor and the Comfort Women

"Lavabit - an encrypted email service which is used by pedophiles and terrorist networks - was shut down after refusing to give the government access to important data that could have lead to arrests."

At least from what Google News indicates, it's more like "ignore" than "spin". The one news article I could find from a US newspaper was this one from the Sioux City Journal, which is an Associated Press story not spun to the extent you suggest. It does speak of Snowden as a "leaker" rather than a "whistleblower". There's a New Yorker blog post that's somewhat opposed to the NSA.

And, in fact, there's an article from a Kansas City public radio station that quotes a Wired article that says "Court records show that, in June, Lavabit complied with a routine search warrant targeting a child pornography suspect in a federal case in Maryland.", so it's not saying that Lavabit is a pedophile haven.

If you read the article, they're pressing the NSA to let them rifle through the NSA database and avail themselves of NSA technical resources. They're using reasoning like "this drug money could be supporting terrorists ! " Well, just anything could be supporting terrorists; terrorists get their cash from legit enterprises (bin Laden) and unwitting customers to other legal enterprises (Hawala etc. ) .

The problem is, the wider the access to that kind of deeply personal information, the greater the likelihood it will be abused.

Take for example the jaw-dropping abuse present within the asset forfeiture programme- reader alert- if you're inclined to high blood pressure when totally and finally morally outraged , you actually may not want to follow this link:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman

Americans WILL turn on the love affair they have with law enforcement if law enforcement oversteps its bounds. If I were a seasoned DEA vet heading a department, I'd run like hell away from my agents being able to access NSA style information about common Americans. My reasoning would be, given the potential applications of this information and my lack of real detailed control over the individual actions by each member of army of people under my charge, it's going to blow up in my our face and the backlash will be crippling.

Have we not learned that even heavily vetted people can't be trusted ? Think of the applications readily available information about your searches could yield.

Realistic example: Harkening back to the article I linked to, what if citizens' became so angry, some of them formed a nascent movement to repeal civil forfeiture laws. From the POV of some law enforcement, that is literally am mortal threat to their existence. People who mortally threaten my police department with financial extinction , whether they mean to be or not, are a threat to public safety. Therefore, I am interested to know exactly who those citizens are. I will then instruct my officers to pretext them (think up a false excuse to pull them over) when they're driving and take things from there.Perhaps they'll make it easy on us and prove to have an attitude. Perhaps their internet activity can be construed to be suspicious. Perhaps I know their employer...

Someone (can't remember who) has pointed out that anonymity begets respect between people who are otherwise strangers because you instinctively aren't sure what sort of resources or connections the stranger has available to them. If that is removed because of unilateral, intimate and omniscient knowledge, then all respect and constraint is lost and people are effectively deprived of their humanity. They become objects instead of equals, observed, known, measured, their foibles exposed for the observers amusement, ridicule and ultimately unbridled contempt. See- NSA analysts passing around audio recordings of overseas military personnel having phone sex with their spouses:

http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/trevor-paglen-turnkey-tyranny-surveillance-and-the-terror-state/

This is where this goes. This is a psychological fact about humans. This kind of invasion, like the abuse of civil forfeiture laws, has the power, that is it carries sufficient emotional charge, to tear this nation apart. The government can't kid themselves that this is just a technical issue looking for a technical solution, or that the most abusive and corrosive applications of this kind of power won't materialize and be fully realized.

No WMD is soon going threaten Western civilization unless it also unleashes a real widespread loss of faith government and government's motivations. Unleashing NSA -style surveillance on the average citizen is the fast track, the force multiplier to any WMD attack that al Queda wants.

One day, it may c

If you are interested, a few months ago the new yorker had a great article detailing exactly what happened here with first hand interviews with most of the players. You can then make your own decisions.

Requiem for a dream: the tragedy of aaron swartz

What I got out of the article was 1) He was not trying to "make a statement" with his "hacking" action, but that was how the government portraited it. 2) He was very ecentric, and primarily seems to have killed himself because of what the legal action would have done to his future career. He had aspirations of running a foundation or becoming active in politics, and he felt that having a criminal record crippled his future. 3) One of the tipping points was having many of his personal correspondences subpenaed, as he was a very private person, which the government did solely to embarrass him, by making him and his girlfriends correspondences over the years, public.

In the end though, I think he just over reacted. His suicide was his doing and no one elses. Sometimes life will try and break you down and if you give up, then you die. I think if he had more robust coping strategies he could have seen that this was just a speed bump on the road of life and not over reacted by killing himself. The "crimes" he committed were not really that bad, and prosecutors are going to be mean and aggressive - that is their job. However of course, I was not in his shoes, so who am i to judge.

It is really just a tragedy.

A recent New Yorker article (paywall) on a Buddhist monk who consoles people contemplating suicide brought up this issue. (Suicide being another social phenomena Japan is dealing with.) One hikikomori he consoled said his lifestyle is not quite unlike a monk's in terms of withdrawal from society.

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Mentions Doug: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

Some criticism of that: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/05/23/gladwell-on-innovation-truths-confusions-part-1/

That is, as long as those students don't object to being watched constantly by a camera.

I don't meant to sound like a card-carrying member of the Fringe Lunatic Association, but after the multiple recent revelations that the LEO's ride around photographing cars and license plates, USPS photographs all mail, the NSA collects metadata on all phone calls, the FBI and NSA together mine data from social networks—in short, that the US government in fact does all those things that the fringe lunatics warned about for years—it's hard to trust a university, whether state-run or private, with a camera to watch me at my computer in much the same way that it's impossible to trust Microsoft to watch me with an always-on X-Box One camera/mic setup.* I feel that recent events have given students very good reason to question whether the benefits of automatic frustration-recognition software are worth the risk that some sort of data might make its way from the camera to an FBI/NSA/Fusion database, despite the sturdiest ringfences and firewalls of promises, hope, and trust. Really, if the MOOC designers are really concerned about frustration, why not just include an "I'm frustrated! Give me a hint!" button on the user interface? Why monitor faces through a camera, and why propose the idea at the same time that MS's creepy XBox camera idea went down in flames?

This isn't about swinging fists. It's about writing about it. This isn't about anything physical. It's about a form of expression. About writing. About typing letters on a keyboard.

It's about threatening to swing a fist, which is no more protected than the actual swinging.

And if you don't think words on a keyboard have very real consequences, the family of Gabrielle Molina would like a word. Along with the family of Erin and Shannon Gallagher. And the family of Megan Meier.