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"Or, instead of trying to generally extend/eliminate the statute of limitations, they may change the law to suspend the clock when encryption is used, so the time it takes from the day the evidence is seized or sniffed to the day it is decrypted doesn't "count.""

As part of the 2015 Intelligence Authorization Act (believe that was the right name), the NSA's agents in the House and Senate inserted language into the bill (the President signed it shortly thereafter so its law now) at the last minute basically legalizing the U.S. government to vacuum up all electronic communications (i.e. all the stuff they've been doing clandestinely) and if its of interest to the intelligence establishment or it is encrypted (it specifically mentions it) then they can keep it forever (no time limits).

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

I'm expecting a movement to remove works from PD, and place them back under copyright protections.

I hate to be the bearer of ill tidings, but you might be interested in knowing that it's already happened.

Which given the excuses for this stuff is really telling.(Since the whole "You're stealing from the creators" is one of the arguments you hear about this shit.) So these days you have shit like Hollywood accounting and things like the author of Forrest Gump literally not getting paid royalties for the movie.(Because it supposedly didn't make a profit.) Of course there's the whole thing screwing of musicians by record labels. Basically if you record an album don't expect to get any profits at all. If you make any money it will be off touring. Here's one, just to show how much of a bunch of scum bags they really are. https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

...and represents a significant amount of lost income for an artist. The income, which the artist needs to recoup the investment that making the music took.

You really should look into that some more, and then you'll realise how much the artist is being fucked over by the label, so much more so than by any downloader. Buy an album? The artist makes a few cents.

A FEW FUCKING CENTS.

The remaining $30? Well, that goes to the distributor, the label, the producer, the shop that sold it, the engineer, but the artist? From what I know, it's between FOUR CENTS and TWELVE CENTS.

PER ALBUM.

Get off your high horse, and stop propping up a corrupt industry.?

There, fixed the headline for you, to more accuratly reflect the facts. ref

The US actually did say that, in a way.

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Of course that's in the context of asymmetrical war in poor, failed state countries.

Always good to keep in mind with Skype, courtesy of Edward Snowden, Microsoft, as a partner to the NSA, rewrote it and coded in pre-encryption access for the NSA for all Skype communications (video, audio and text). Microsoft has never said it has taken them out. So always assume that whatever you do on Skype is getting recorded and kept, for future use, by the NSA or one of the other five eyes agencies.

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

As others have pointed out, last week the U.S. passed a law (and the President signed it), which got no press, authorizing all U.S. citizen communications can be recorded without a warrant and that information can be passed from the NSA (which was created only to spy on external threats...not anymore), kept for as long as the NSA would want and passed directly to law enforcement agencies when they want it. Its not that President Obama won't do anything with your skype communications, its what the future Nixon, McCarthy or (FBI) Hoover, or worse, will do with them.

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

and what's the issue here? Trade secrets, private matters, and gossip.

Not only..: Leaked Emails Reveal MPAA Plans To Pay Elected Officials To Attack Google

Juicy and damning info like this https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Uh, what? We're talking about on-device encryption here. That is very much the issue where YOU encrypt things. The FBI are complaining that Apple and Google have made it too easy to do full encryption (and Google has now made it on by default in Android 5.0), and when people make use of it, they cannot decrypt it even with a warrant.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/fb...
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

> AT&T indefinitely halting future GigaPower FTTH rollouts due to uncertainty over the future of net neutrality

(1) The AT&T fiber-to-the-home rollouts are non-existent for all practical purposes
(2) They walked back that bluff anyway

AT&T Fiber-to-the-Press-Release reinstated.

Don't forget it is the NSA who approves what type of encryption are legal for citizens to own.

There is no illegal encryption — not in the US. You can use anything you can get your hands on.

Now, getting your hands on something, the NSA can't break, may be difficult — because they have sabotaged efforts to develop strong crypto. But not because it is illegal.

That said, the existing freely available software — including OpenSSL — can be used properly to defeat would-be spooks. We know this — and the observation is confirmed by occasional stories on how the government leans on companies to reveal the private keys. If they could break the encryption itself, they wouldn't be demanding keys...

Belgian Newspapers 'Give Permission' To Google To Return Them To Search Results/a?

There is at least one other instance I am aware of that might suggest you are correct:
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

The real aim is to move the internet under Title II so that it can be heavily regulated. It would also be subjected to the 16.1% universal service fund tax (as spelled out in the telecom act of 1996).

Neither of those assertions are remotely true. There were already periods where Internet access was subject to Common Carrier regulations, and parts of Verizon's FiOS network are still under it to this day because it gave a tax and subsidy benefit to Verizon. If anything, internet access is already HEAVILY regulated, and Title II would simplify things immensely.

The bit about the USF tax is just propaganda from the NCTA.

Truthfulness of a statement if an absolute defence against defamation in the UK. Not like some places

If these companies are willing to spend soooo much on this spectrum, that means they are going to fight tooth and nail against any sort of free public wifi. The laws they bought to kill municipal broadband are going to be chicken-shit compared to the laws they will pay to kill municipal wifi.

That's where we're just going to disagree. I don't see Title II as a starting point. I think we all want net neutrality in essence, but I don't believe Title II is the way to achieve it. But my core claim here is that the AT&T is behaving rationally due to regime uncertainty. I don't disagree that the ISPs are up to no good, but at the same time they do what they are allowed to get away with by us and the government. But most of all, businesses respond to incentive structures. So I say let's force that. The kind of legal action I would be in favor of would be breaking up these telco/isp/content-provider cartels. The cable companies in the United States were, initially, the only game in town with the infrastructure pre-existing that could handle moderate broadband access. This met the needs of the general public until about 2006-ish, the speeds were OK, and cable TV wasn't competing with cable internet in essence, because streaming wasn't that big yet. This is no longer the case, and people are opting more and more to cut the cord and just get internet access for the content needs. So now the cable companies are going to try to get up to mischief because one of their services directly competes with another, or you can access competitor-cartel content with their access and they want you to stay with their sphere of influence. I believe the solution is to make it so that ISPs can only be ISPs. We're reaching a level of cartel like behavior that provoked the anti-trust backlash of the gilded age; and I think it's time to sharpen up the Sherman Act for a new millennium. While Title II would enforce utility like behavior on the ISPs, it would still allow them to be connected to their parent institutions, and they would still have incentives to get up to mischief. I say remove the incentive to do mischief rather than make it illegal to get up to it. Then we can get truly competitive behavior from people who are fundamentally in the businesses of providing you the best internet. So when I say that Title II isn't the right way to achieve net neutrality it is because I think incentive structures are a more powerful way of influencing behavior than regulation. Title II provides an incentive to be a utility company; and I don't remember the last time my utility company did anything except raise my rates for the exact same service.

It's interesting. We do agree on what the problems are and from where the locus of issues stem. In fact, I think we agree far more than we disagree.

While we do disagree about Title II (I suggest reading the act itself), it doesn't create utilities of the ISPs. In fact, there are portions of AT&T and Verizon's (as well as others) networks that are covered under TItle II to this day. I wouldn't call either of those guys utilities, would you?).

The broadband providers were classfied as Title II until 2002, and that's when things started going downhill, IMHO.

That's my take, but reasonable people can disagree and that's a good thing, as long as we're focused on the real issues, rather than some fake "partisan divide" designed to divide us.

Getting that out of the way, I think we agree more than we disagree. I have no problem with incentivizing folks to move us forward. In fact, it's an excellent idea. But you need to have the other side of the coin as well. Carrot and stick. Incentives *and* regulation.

We tried the carrot (reclassification to Title I -- as I mentioned, these guys were Title II before 2002), local franchises with limited or no competition, subsidies to the tune of $200 Billion and on and on and on). What did they do with those incentives? Bought up some of the competition, squashed most of the others, did not upgrade their infrastructure unless there was a competitor breathing down their necks, and even then they were mostly FTTPR implementations.

As you correct

https://www.techdirt.com/blog/...

No link to the actual announcement, but Techdirt says AT&T, "announced yet another $3 billion fixed-line CAPEX investment cut just last Friday."
In other words, they cut investment, then hear from the President, then blame the cut on the President's plan.
Typical AT&T bullshit.

This money.

And that money.

I wasn't being hypothetical: The FCC has already put forward their "hybrid" approach. I've not read anything that says anyone called bullshit and they backed off it, though.

(Link is a secondary source, references paywalled WSJ article, but the quotes are what I linked it for. I didn't read what the techdirt guy had to add to it)

This is why the Gentle User cannot have nice things.

Tor must be implemented with precision. The steps are involved because the theory is involved. Some of the better, well-informed and technically savvy users have been busted.

I am an IT professional and I am not at all comfortable that I could use Tor and guarantee my own anonymity.

I advise people against using Tor in hopes that they will be able to surf without discovery because it can give a false sense of freedom to do as one wishes.

"Similarly, M-Lab's data shows that the problem wasn't a lack of bandwidth on the part of the ISPs (i.e., no actual technical congestion), because those same ISPs had no problem connecting to a different transit provider, Internap. So the only logical culprit was the interconnection points. There was more than enough bandwidth to go around. There's just the single bottleneck of the interconnection border router (which, again, is trivially simple to get rid of by opening up more ports)."

link

I'm having a hard time being outraged by a guy dumb enough to click a seattletirnes link on his myspace account.

There are real things to be outraged over, like the time the government used a MITM attack at the ISP to serve malware on the real slashdot site.

Wha?

Wrong.

Cite:

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

usually it's the State Department who declares whomever as a terrorist, not a local judge. I can't quote specific law but you can read this and this but seeing as recently the FBI declared the beheading in Oklahoma "not linked to terrorism" beside the fact he was a Islamic convert who had ISIS stuff all over his FB.

Until individual state legislatures start passing laws allowing their local jurisdictions to declare individuals (and groups) terrorists, your "cop judge" theory is a none-starter (for now). This would quickly end up in the Supreme Court; it's akin to a state deciding to declare war on a group or individual. Oklahoma can't legally have a judge declare someone a terrorist any more than they can legally invade Mexico with the Oklahoma National Guard. The whole system doesn't work that way.

I still control whether I give you the original or a copy of it

Well, I suppose that it's possible that you might unplug your hard drive, put it in a cardboard box, and mail it to me, in response to a download request, but that's surely too unusual to care about.

Because the law defines making copies as a form of infringement, defines copies as material objects, and because we lack the ability to send a material object through the net, you cannot transmit an original copy of a work to me online. All you can do is give me the information I need to create a new copy on my end.

Very few times will you ever have the ability to determine if the file on my server or computer is copied or deleted

It's irrelevant whether you delete the file once I've downloaded it. The Copyright Act doesn't treat a copy followed by a deletion as not being copying. It doesn't matter in the least how many copies actually exist in the end, only what the provenance of the copies is. There is an essay called 'What colour are your bits?' which you may find helpful.

it is transferred to your system

It is not, in any legally meaningful way, transferred anywhere.

Please take a look at this page, which discusses the outcome of the ReDigi case, and includes a copy of the opinion. ReDigi tried to sell used music files, going through the sort of copy and delete rigamarole as you suggest. They got shut down hard because it's utter nonsense as far as the legal system is concerned.

If they leaked information to the press about stuff to shape opinion that would be domestic propaganda, that would be illegal.

Not anymore. They legalized propaganda last year. And no, I'm not joking.

The Twitter blog entry cited says that they are prevented from revealing the number of NSL & FISA orders received even if that number is zero. The text of the lawsuit explains that under the terms of the settlement in January between the government and Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo! (laid down in what the lawsuit calls the Deputy Attorney General's letter (PDF), companies are allowed to give either the numbers of NSL & FISA orders received and accounts affected but only in bands of 1000, of which the first is 0-999, or the total number of orders received in bands of 250, starting with 0-249. Is that what killed Apple's warrant canary?

Twitter want to publish more specific numbers, including zero. They say that "The DAG Letter cites to no authority for these restrictions on service providers’ speech" and argue that anyway the settlement doesn't apply to them.

A previous blog entry says Twitter want "to provide that information in much smaller ranges that will be ... more in line with the relatively small number of non-national security information requests we receive." According to Twitter's last transparency report, there were 1257 information requests from law enforcement in the US, covering 1918 accounts. Does this suggest that Twitter receive about the same number of NSL & FISA orders?

Unless the eyewitness is wearing a badge. Then his testimony magically becomes more accurate than video. I wish I was kidding: https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

The Microsoft that delays releasing patches for zero-day vulnerabilities so the NSA can exploit them first? The one that took 7 years to fix a known vulnerability? The one that took 7 months to fix a remote IE exploit after it was reported, just because it wasn't public enough?

And with linux, as long as you install from your distribution (that already have most if not all that you will ever need to install), you have security fixes for all of what you have installed, not just the kernel or a minimal core of apps.

A good reading of what he's saying, and why it's wrong, is available here:
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Yeah; it took two days to show up on slashdot after getting covered there.

Secondly, if such automation is practical and within reach, why aren't they pursuing it already?

McDonalds demonstrated it was technically feasible roughly eleven years ago.

Others have since made a few improvements.

Is it dead or not ? is debatable ... https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Didn't the Australian government sort of recommend users to bypass Geo-IP blocks using VPNs and all that as a way to get cheaper content?

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
in 2008 it was a very different argument

She's probably just fine with the *state* peeping into your (not her) business. That's the very definition of a self labeled "progressive". Guns, drones, private (no tax man involved) monetary interactions between people, healthcare, retirement, etc.

Actually, Sotomayor is a bit of an outlier on the Supreme Court and has been highlighted for laying the groundwork to reinstate stronger Fourth Amendment protections -- particularly against the government intrusions -- especially in her ruling in United States v. Jones . (For details on her privacy rulings before joining the Court, you can see EPIC's summary here.)

Note that in TFA she was warning about "Orwellian" surveillance, which specifically tends to refer to a world where the government is spying on you, not just private citizens. The quotation highlighted in TFS seems to focus on private citizen regulations, but she has also demonstrated more concern about many government invasions of privacy than most other Supreme Court members, including those who are definitely NOT ''progressives."

re "How can you fine someone for not cooperating in activities that the government refused to even admit existed?"
The 'The One Telco Exec Who Resisted The NSA Has Been Released From 4+ Years In Jail" (2013/09/27)
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

I take it you never have heard of Hollywood accounting? https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

What we really need to do is start using a distributed search engine.

Does anyone have a script a customer can stick to when dealing with Comcast?

The Comcast call center script, with points values, was leaked a while ago. If you want to annoy the other person then you can just read off what number and the section heading as they go through it.

Just don't forget to record the call, otherwise they'll do things like charge you for something that they said was free.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Now police's only tool are military-grade weapons, intended to kill.

And sometimes the situation changes how people is, like in this Standford prison experiment

Add to that how police cover up miscarriages and that you can't film the police, is not just who watches the watchers, but who watches the watchers that have military-grade weapons in the streets and are abusing of them.

Going to slashdot is safe? No SSL here.

GCHQ has already spoofed Slashdot in the past. So no, going to Slash dot is not safe.

If they want you, they can't get you?

All right then. Let's all just roll over and die, why don't we?

Look, I get your cynicism, but don't let it run to fatalism. There are things you can do:

• - Stop making it easy on them. Stop using Windows. Seriously. Understand that what's convenient for you is often convenient for them.
• - Stop using proprietary software at all. Yes, yes, HeartBleed nothing is safe bla bla bla. I'm not talking about safe, though; I'm talking about safer. And FOSS is, objectively, a safer environment, and will remain so even after it becomes popular.
• - Start building and using federated, encrypted, decentralised, peer-to-peer systems. I honestly don't know why geeks didn't do this years ago, but why the fuck is Facebook the state of the art in social media? I mean, seriously. It's not only a privacy disaster area, it's a badly polished piece of shit to boot. We know that They don't like TOR because it's harder for Them. We know That they don't like bittorrent because it's harder for Them. So why the fuck are we not taking a clue from that and creating a UseNET we can go back to? I mean, I get why the peons don't, but we're geeks, for fuck sake. That used to mean something.
• - Start re-imagining an internet whose physical characteristics resemble its protocols. At the outset, we thought it would be cool to have generic protocols that ran more or less transparently on any old network at all. What we didn't realise was that just because stupid networks were possible, that didn't mean they were inevitable. The whole ICANN/ITU fiasco is all the evidence we need to see that the world's telcos have begun to realise how much ground they've lost and they want it back. But that doesn't mean we have to give it to them. Mesh topologies using low-power devices are the only we we cut them back down to size.

You can get all fatalistic if you like, but if your only response to the encroachments of authority is to run further and faster, then (apologies to Scotsmen everywhere) you're not a real geek.

Newsflash! Slashdot already has been targeted by NSA!!

Don't take my word for it: Link 1 and Link 2.

US Patent Office Grants Massively More Patents Than Ever Before (2011)
  https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

The world envies US Patent system (according to USPTO head):
  http://beta.slashdot.org/story...

As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.

"He didn't get this data," Alexander told a New Yorker reporter. "They didn't touch --"

"The operational data?" the reporter asked.

"They didn't touch the FISA data," Alexander replied. He added, "That database, he didn't have access to."

I always found it amusing that the Author's Guild always seems to enthusiastically back whatever it is the publishers want to happen, even to the detriment of their supposed constituency...

I'd rather hear from authors, personally, than a group that fought against libraries/universities making electronic archives of books for research...

Look, if authors/publishers aren't happy with Amazon, they don't have to do business with them. They can sell their books direct to the customer, even in a format the user can load right onto their Kindle, nothing's stopping them. Saying Amazon is the "only buyer" is B.S. The term 'buyer' doesn't mean anything (in the way you're using it) when you're dealing with purely electronic goods. Amazon doesn't "buy" an inventory of ebooks to sell, there's no supply to monopolize.

Until very recently Congress were the only individuals exempt from insider trading laws.

They effectively still are. A key part of the STOCK act was rolled back after the election.

Therefore, Congress will pass a law making itself exempt from CIA/NSA spying and the rest of the country be damned.

Interestingly, the UK already has something like this, it's called the Wilson Doctrine and is not a law but rather a promise the Prime Minister makes to MP's by tradition.

there were stories about this in the past weeks..

"As part of the American Civil Liberties Union's recent report on police militarization, the Massachusetts chapter of the organization sent open records requests to SWAT teams across that state. It received an interesting response. As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments...Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they're private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they're immune from open records requests."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/...

also this link, which I think does a better (and more snarky) job in discussing the issue.

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...