Slashdot Mirror
"They Are Watching Everyone"
A
Moscow Times story
shows us what happens when privacy protections are few or ineffective. A Russian private-eye firm has bought a $50,000 black-market database "on 140 politicians, journalists, businessmen and criminals," and is now publishing it. Why? Because "we want people to know the spirit of the KGB is alive ... the telephone tapping and surveillance of hundreds of Russian citizens indicates that the country is under a microscope and that this microscope is more intense than that of the KGB/FSB." One woman whose phone conversations were bugged by the free-lance spies says: "Soon, we will look back with nostalgia at the times when we were only listened to by the KGB and not by God-knows-whom, by anybody." Hyperbole? Perhaps. Fortunately, this could never happen here.
Irony, of course.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
The police are in the executive branch of the government (enforcing the laws), while judges are in the judicial branch (interpretting the laws). The judiciary is supposed to check the power of the executive branch, there is nothing "redundant" about that.
One of the reasons that those requests are rarely denied is because the police know what is required to get permission and don't want to waste their own, or the judges, time making a request without reasonable suspicion. Also, just because a judge gives permission for a wiretap doesn't mean that a good defense lawyer won't get it thrown out in court.
-B
PS- I'm not saying the system works perfectly, but it is designed well.
According to my logs from today, you spent 3 hours surfing the web (an hour of that on Slashdot), an hour and a half playing Minesweeper, clipped your fingernails for 15 minutes, and wrote one email to your girlfriend. BTW, if you're going to do that thing with the baby oil, you should put a shower curtain down on the floor first.
-Agent B
Maybe jamie should have wrote it as:
<sarcasm>Fortunately, this could never happen here</sarcasm>
so we wouldn't have to deal with people who can't recognize sarcasm pointing out how naive he (she?) is.
Well, look at it this way.
The law enforcement types say they need to curtail civil liberties to be effective.
Ok, they got it.
Step back from an occaisional drug bust and look at the situation as a whole. Are they demonstratively more effective than before?
If not,then we've just traded our liberties for nothing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Every day, it seems, we see more and more stories about how group X is violating privacy. From Echelon to RealNetworks, privacy abuse is very, very obviously pervasive and almost totally unchecked.
And what does the /. crowd do? They bitch. Bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch. Katz spews out another horror piece. User comments that amount to little more than "that sucks!" are moderated up to 5. Endless debate occurs over the rights of states & corporations vs. the rights of the individuals. On and on and on...
In the meantime, little harm occurs to those who violate these rights. Have you written or called your Congresscritter to bitch about this? Yes, money rules politics. But so does the ballot box. If they think that there are concerned citizens out there it will at least give them pause before voting for the "Feinstein-Helms Let's Give the Corporations More Power to Eavesdrop Bill of 2000". PLEASE spend less time posting comments here and more time calling up Congressmembers. Bitch to THEM. Get active! As cool as /. is, it affects policy only marginally. "They've got the guns but we've got the numbers" as Jim Morrison famously said. Bitch, moan, complain and do so loudly and consistently.
[Note: This message applies worldwide: just replace "Congress" with "Parliament" or "Duma" or whatever happens to apply to your particular locale. But fucking DO it. Nothing positive will happen in the "real world", no matter how high your karma is here.]
This should probably be modded as flamebait, because I am trying to be inflammatory. I *want* people to get pissed.
And while we're at it, can someone email me & tell me why IPv6/IPsec hasn't been widely implemented yet? Packet level encryption would help in situations like this.
- Rev.It's hard to take a moral stand when your snout is deep in the slop.
I told *two* grocery stores that I would change my shopping habits and never darken their door again rather than provide personally identifiable marketing information. Fortunately the third chain (Albertsons) has repeatedly stated that they will not introduce them. When I really wanted something that only a carded store carried, I shopped at the local grocery store and paid full price. (It subsequently went bankrupt and was purchased by Albertsons.)
This was a pain, but nobody can accuse me of sitting on the fence. I was also always very clear that I would accept their cards if they were truly anonymous - put a bowl of them out on the customer service desk and donate any bonus points to charity. I'll grab a new card every few months - long enough for you to collect real marketing information, but not long enough that I would worry about my privacy. I have been told by all stores that that is "impossible."
In contrast, you're already in bed with the marketers. You lie, other people swap cards at parties, but you all buy into the Big Lie that it's legitimate for a grocery store to demand personal information in exchange for token discounts on merchandise they artificially marked up in the first place. (E.g., I noticed that 2-liter bottles of soda shot up from $0.99/2L to $3.99/2L, with a "sale" price of $1.99/2L, after the introduction of these cards.) When they decide to crack down on identity fraud and demand that you provide real information to get your discounts you're not in a strong moral position to protest.
This seems like a minor point, but if you look at the civil disobediences that worked (including the experiences of POW camp survivors) you'll see that one of the common threads is that the leaders and members always made an explicit effort to avoid any benefits which weren't available to all. I'll take advantange of a sales price which is available to everyone, card or not, but I won't accept a sales price that in any way - no matter how small - reflects special treatment in return for cooperation.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Of course, you won't realize it until one day your health insurance agent says they are downgrading you to a 'At Risk' group, doomed to pay more, simply because they noticed that you haven't been buying the 5% fat beef instead of the 20% fat beef.
More likely, it will be because of cigarettes or alcohol. Cigarettes are almost ALWAYS cheaper with a card.
There was one particular lawsuit where someone sued a grocery store, and they brought up alcohol purchases on his club card in their legal defense.
I generally avoid these type of cards for that reason. Of course, if you have use a credit card, all of that information is logged anyway. For maximum privacy the only option is cash.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
I hate to be the pessimist/conspiratory theorist here, but truthfully, for all that I know my phones are tapped by uncounted numbers of people/organizations. I would never know about it, from the "end user" point of view, but somebody could easily be eavesdropping on all my conversations, e-mail (can anybody say Echelon?), and God knows what else. Just because the U.S. government says they are upholding the law and not bending it does not make it true. I recall a bit of text placed on the music video for Van Halen's "Right Now" song... "Right Now, our government is doing things you think only other governments do" It's not far from the truth, folks.
------
It's too late to hope it never happens here, it already happens every day.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has lobbied for and received an amazing suite of powers, ostensibly for use in fighting the 'War on Drugs'. Not only can the DEA seize cash and assets without proof of wrongdoing, mere suspicion, they can also get wiretaps on suspected criminals with minimal evidence. In fact, DEA and other law enforcement can now get wiretaps without the inconvenience of justifying it to a judge by merely waving the flag of 'Drug War'. After that, it's basically a blank wiretapping check that's written in their name.
For a more pervasive example of observastion, take a look at the grocery 'Club Cards' that are becoming popular. These cards allow the stores to attach names to the lists of purchases made. There is nothing to prevent them from selling this information to insurance companies and marketing companies in the years to come. Of course, you won't realize it until one day your health insurance agent says they are downgrading you to a 'At Risk' group, doomed to pay more, simply because they noticed that you haven't been buying the 5% fat beef instead of the 20% fat beef. A marketer might call you up one day and ask you to try Pepsi instead of Coke, or browbeat you on your choice of laundry detergents.
Phone tapping isn't the biggest problem anymore, it's all the OTHER data that's sorted, collated, and filed under you social security number.
As the story indicates, the leading suspect here for gathering this information is the independent news television station. You might have noticed that journalists and network news shows also believe thy are allowed to committ fraud to secretly tape private conversations.
This is news?
First, let me state that I don't like drugdealers and their like at all. Softdrugs (cannabis) is merely OK with me, harddrugs are just bad. But that's off-topic. But the Mafia was born in the time that alcohol was illegal in the USA, and gangs started making big money with it. It turned out that prohibiting alcohol gave more trouble than allowing and controlling it. The same goes, for a great part, for drugs. One can easily become 100 years using heroine of a good, pure quality, and noone has to bother about people using this. Now, it's big money and it's mixed with all kinds of shit that causes users to become sick etc, and it's expensive, so people have to steal to use it. IMHO it'd be better to legalize it and control it. :-) ) to have a finger into everything, everywhere. So what works better than to create a devil (drugs) and have a force with almost unlimited power to 'fight' it? :-) )
BUT America wants to have an excuse (yes, I'm finally coming to my point here
The DEA is such a force, it's everywhere and when America thinks it's needed to do something about a thing they don't like, they use it. And. of course, everything and everyone has to be monitored everywhere. I think the DEA is just an excuse to get influence.
Am I lucky I live in the Netherlands! (Yes, I have used cannabis for years, absolutely problemless, I stopped, without any problem, and I'm not using any other drugs (apart from caffeine), never have used other drugs, and never wanted to. But that's off-topic again
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
That still probably holds true for most of us. The only names on the database are high-profile: 140 politicians, journalists, businessmen and criminals.
I doubt anyone's Slashdot Karma level is sufficient to bring about such scrutiny.
Let's say someone did tap my phone. What will they use the information for? Will they attempt to blackmail me with information regarding cheating on my diet? What would they expect to gain? My assets are few. I try to live my life peaceably with others and within the limitations of the law.
The simple fact is that there are so many people and only a few of them can be dedicated to playing back every phone call (even at high speed) or tailing a person in hopes of finding something useful. Targets have to be picked based on high profile or probable cause and I don't qualify. Neither, likely, do you.
carlos
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.