Slashdot Mirror
How The Government Spies On Your Internet Use
intnsred writes "In explaining the recent PATRIOT act ACLU lawsuit, a D.C. civil rights lawyer writes, "I am sure that many of you reading this (and I, likely) have the government in our computers....Until now, we did not know much about how the government goes about this procedure. Now we do." Fascinating details of the case and how easy it is for the gov't to get warrantless access to you through your ISP. This clarifies and expands a previous /. article."
they cant get into my commodore 64!
:)
Mmmmm Zak McKracken
Thank goodness.
I mean, who would have expected anything less? They can already tap phones, why not the Internet. All in the name of protecting the world from terrorism. Hooray.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
... because my tinfoil beanie blocks their mind-control rays. (complete with propeller)
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
i guess if you keep repeating "but we are free" enough people will believe it
50% of USA still think Saddam and Al-Queda are connected so it shows psy-ops works
I work at a small ISP, and I've never seen any requests for passwords or email from any law enforcement agency in the 4 years I have worked here. We have around 50,000 customers in the Northeast US. We do, however, get 1 or 2 requests per month from the RIAA or MPAA to warn our customers about distributing copyrighted material.
While in their FAQ's they (/.) state that they've only ever removed one comment... how does that apply/work now? Slashdot is an equal target for the PATRIOT act, as well as their hosts and the people who post here... hell even posting under the 'Post Anonymously' option may have certain 'caveats'.
Food for thought people, food for thought.
What's the point of an 'internet wiretap' when anything important to law enforcement is probably encrypted with a key long enough to take years to crack?
Am I the only person who has 4096-bit RSA?
All I can say is.....I'm glad I'm Canadian!! Our government here in Canada certainly isn't perfect....but looking at the USA from the outside, they are heading down the slippery slope towards a police state. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." At this rate, the average American will have neither liberty or safety before long.
"If it's stupid and it works....it's not stupid."
They really should create a category of story called "Tin-foiled hat". The logo for this category would be quite interesting I'm sure ;) This story and many past ones would be perfect to fall into this category!! ;)
DrkBr
It you are an American and you don't like this, get out and vote in November.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
If all email was encrypted by default the spies would need a lot of computing power.
Great shame that they didn't post it as a MS word document having just blacked out the offending sections. What did you say about an undo facility ?
Can someone please explain to me how this is indicative of the principles on which the USA was founded ? On where John Hancock and his mates saw a US goverment with the ability to spy on its own citizens, and on how this all makes sure we have a goverment "of the people, by the people and for the people" ?
I might be a bit depressed having just re-read 1984, but with the US and Airstrip 1... I mean Britain, working together on a strategy underpinned by propoganda and the continual spying on its citizens by the US Goverment you have to ask whether Orwell was just out by 20 years.
Jeb's Big Brother is in the Whitehouse folks, trouble is he kind of looks likes everyones Big Brother right now.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Just assume you have no privacy, at least not in the classical sense of the word.
Do you need a website upgrade?
In other words, the Patriot act is being used to stifle dissent against the act itself.
Well I for one welcome our new American overlords....oh wait
In Soviet Russia, the Government spies on YOU!...oh wait...DOH!
They are (supposedly) elected representatives of the people, its in your power to sack them if you are unhappy with what they are doing. Start explaining vociferously to you CongressPerson/Senator what the issue is and act with your ballot.
That aside, I am surprised at how strongly I feel about the by passing of legal stewardship in these issues. Normally I dont have alot of time for them but they do have their uses in a checks and bounds system. Obviously secrecy is required to carry out these operations but whats so hard about going to a judge if you have a valid case ? I think the recent statements by Ashcroft are indicative though. After Sept 11 all Arabic young men were potential terrorists. Now this has been expanded to include all young/middle aged/fathers/European looking Arabic men. No doubt Europeans and Asians will soon be included based on this logic.
Its becoming a concern that the US its leaders and institutions are becoming more and more isolated from the people they are supposed to represent and serve.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Saves them from dealing with many small fish.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Numerous words, sentences and entire sections of the documents related to the suit, which are posted on the group's website, remain blacked out.
8 21 4&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=172&tid= 93
Sounds like a job for Claire Whelan, a dictionary and text analysis software.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/16/144
yes, yet another another self-correction by the patentdead eyecon0meter.
This government is not the first of its type, merely the finest in a long tradition of governments that care.
When the government slows down your porn searches.... BASTERDS!
The company I work for owns an ISP.
We too, have had several "requests" from the RIAA for users info, etc. We told them to fuck off and get a warrant.
Haven't seen nor heard from them again.
Ditto the US feds.
Some ISPs have a backbone you know.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Borrow some of that so hard to stop spamming technology, organise some people and create thousands of virtual terrorist cells that 'plan' attacks on everything from national monuments to the McDonalds up the road from me. See how they cope with that.
I will wait now for the FBI to arrive for suggesting this.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
how long will it take for mankind to realize we're not living in a democratic civilization in the ancient-athens term of the word?
these are democratically elected dectorships.
wikipedia on the term dictator:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator
Check out about the roman - first meaning - of the word.
Bush and his secret squirrel cronies can't get into my Ninnle box, either!
Doe and the ACLU are asking the court to deem unconstitutional the government's use of National Security Letters (NSLs), which allow FBI agents to demand, with no judicial oversight, personal information about clients of Internet Service Providers.
One could argue that the government is using unfettered powers to protect the people by finding out who could be potential 'terrorists'.
Now the problem is, who is a 'terrorist'?? Who defines the term 'terrorist'?
For instance take this ridiculous example (only to make a point, and makes silly assumptions that does not reflect their true nature):
Say, in a Democrat controlled (assume that they are all pro-Abortion etc.) government, would I be a terrorist if I advocated avoidance of abortion and extolled the virtues of abstinance?
Say, in a Republican controlled (assume that they are all xenophobic and White only), would a person be a terrorist if he/she were of Middle-Eastern descent.
Say, in a Stallmanist regime, would Bill Gates be a terrorist for advocating non-free software :-)
Another irritating point is the use of fancy words to which you cannot say anything near 'no' or 'I object' without the danger of being attacked, like 'Pro-Choice', 'Pro-Life', 'USA Patriot Act', 'Homeland Security', 'Intellectual Property' without looking like a bigot, one-who-condones-murder, unpatriotic, one who does not care for their patriotic duties to protect their homeland and one who condones thieving, respectively..
I have leaned to view everything with such names with suspicion.
Don't believe everything you see in the mainstream media. They are are liberal (which has proven again and again), they hate Bush, they want him to loose in Nov., they currently want to make the US look bad. Question EVERYTHING you see and read, consider that everything in the media has BIAS. Don't be dumbass sucker and just take newspaper headlines and top stories as truth. It's classic Plato Cave/Matrix. See the world through your own eyes.
Wow, let's not cover the crimes of any Democrats.
Bill Clinton used FBI files as light reading, that used to be a crime, y'know.
Lyndon Johnson sent Hoover after every antiwar protestor, and Jimmah Carter had to know everything about everybody.
As far as McCarthy goes, he didn't spy on anyone, nor did anyone in the House of Representatives. The agency that did the spying in the era was the SENATE Un-American Activities Committee, controlled by Democrats, but you'll go on pretending Democrats don't do these kinds of things.
And I sure won't be voting for Kerry, that little sneak.
"Mr Howard and his government are just yes-men to the United States. There they are, a conga line of suckholes on the conservative side of Australian politics.
The backbench sucks up to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister sucks up to George W." - Mark Latham, running for Prime Minister for the other side.
I'm just glad to see someone else is reading Counterpunch! I've been a regular reader for quite a few years.
Sorry, I keep forgetting to add the tongue-in-cheek emoticon to the bottom of my posts...
New! Now featuring everything they said was bad about communism, but with all the buying power of the American Dollar.
terrorists are not that dumb to send unencrypted emails about their plans
they can use web sites, ssl connections, etc
noone is able to monitor (and decrypt) all ssl connections, but if they can get an access to the site itself (when it is running on ISP's server) they can easily get all the information they need
on the other side, i'm running smtp server and web server on my own pc at home
so i'm lucky that i'm not an US citizen, otherwise i would be probably accused of terrorism because FBI cannot get access to my web site just by asking my ISP
We should be the ones spying on our government. They are the evil ones trying to take over the world!
so stop saying it
so the frequent masturbation isn't helping no ?
People, write you representatives and congresspersons and let them know you are *tired* of this shit.
And for fuck's sake, VOTE IN NOVEMBER!
Unless, of course, they have a backdoor to your or the receivers machine.
nope; it is about governmental disregard for constitutionally guaranteed due process rights.
But I guess conformists/authority-lovers (like you) fail to grasp such distinctions. And I feel quite comfortable airing my sentiments online like this, whereas a bumper sticker would afford people like you the opportunity to vandalize my car.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I don't have a problem with the concept of the Patriot Act. There must be a way for the law-enforcement agencies to be able to track criminals. We had the same problems with drug dealers and cellphones.
The obvious (and constitutional solution) is to have judicial oversight. Just like the s.o.b.s at RIAA, you must go to a judge somewhere and say "we suspect this person of doing this. Please give us a search warrant." No problem. The FBI would be limited in what information they can use for procecution. That is the way the Constitution is supposed to work.
"I drank what?" - Socrates
You manage to dump about 100 posts so far - but none seems to have read the article; that's clear from your 'blurp' posts. Shame on you!
Well, let me make it easy for you. I have read the article and it sucks. There is NO information in it. C'mOn Slashdot, check such stories a bit more out before you make a story about nothing.
It works. Not the tapping itself but the hiding it from the public. I live in a very well educated area and no one seems to notice things like this. It's just scary how it's ignored. I have a friend who is intelligent and somewhat nerdy and you know what he says? "That's life." We are America we are supposed to be able to speak out about things we don't like.... Not anymore.
A ruler wears a crown while the rest of us wear hats. But which would you rather have when it's raining?
Obviously the major concern is about the damage done to individual privacy, but there's another side to it that, in the long run, can be just as important.
When a government agency begins covertly compiling personal data on individuals, it sets in motion a long chain of events that can have implications far beyond the act of gathering data.
While it is easily possible to keep such record gathering secret for a period of time, history shows that eventually these efforts tend to make it into the public eye. When that happens, the result is often quite the opposite of what was originally intended.
It has happened over and over that political leaders come into power by virtue of the fact that they were the focus of investigations of entities that lost power. These secret lists eventually turn into a who's who of the next body politic. By focusing on certain individuals in hopes of pinning some dirt of them, the opposite effect is often achieved.
So, like so many things in life, this too is a doubled edged street, or a two-way sword or whatever symmetry metaphor you prefer.
Please tell me the average reader isn't that dumb to fall for this crap. Republicans want to rape midicare! Bush reading evervyone's email! The number of auhtorized wiretaps last year probably didn't pass 1000. Most federal agents spend their time following leads provided by good old human phone calls. We are taking about the same agencies who rarely hire and where the average agent barely know how to turn on a PC.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Don't bother.
Boil down the obfsucated high-brow talk, and the information you want is this;
The FBI sends out what are called National Securiy Letters (NSLs) requesting password and other private information from suspected individuals from their ISPs, and the ISPs are foced to comply without admitting this to their customers even if querried.
That's it.
We are moving toward a Soviet style authoritarian state, but without the social safety net, as the neoliberals are taking away the social safety net, they are also taking away personal liberties.
Revolution, anyone? (and when I say that I mean "revolution" at the ballot box, by rule of law).
eat shiat and bark at the moon
To think that the fed does not tap/read email or any other electronic transmission, this posting included, is simply delusional. All the paranoia in the world will not protect you from this, only 2 things can fix this:
1. Never log on to the net, never use your telephone, never mail anything via USPS. There, now you are safe.2. Make a change in goverment - the election process. Yeah, I know it is a slow, ugly process to get any kind of change done, but it is the only way to effect change in this country.
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Basically: whats the point in paranoia if you have nothing to hide anyway?
makes for strange linking fellows.
Linking to counterpunch would generally be seen as left-wing flamebait. Maybe we're seeing left-libertarians and right-libertarians in a de facto alliance against the right-authoritarians? More than the linking, that such articles appear on counterpunch is suggestive.
Any other US watchers with some insight as to what's going on here?
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Hmm.. here is an intresting sitiuation:
The CEO of the ISP recives NSL letter, by
the PATRIOT act he is forbidden to tell anyone
about it and he does not have direct access to
the ACLs of the ISP. How can he comply with the
NSL then?
Dont think you got your facts stright israeli, hizbollah is not in israel its in lebanon, and it only operates in lebanese territorium and defends against israeli aggressions and occupation (when it existed). Its also not supported by saddam or was its supported and created by iran goverment, the enemy of saddam. Also palestinians are not on israeli land, you got to make difference between occupied and non-occupied land, but I guess you israelis dont learn that stuff in school...
And tell me why are people defending themself against israeli aggressions being terrorists while israeli aggressors (provokatures) are being "defenders"?
Okay, folks. How would you go about anonymous internet access / hosting? (who remembers anon@penet.fi) I guess the securest means of internet communication is to engage in a little identify theft / compromise a few servers? Perhaps a new virus could be crafted to make a secure, anonymous, encrypted monster RAID device out of a few hundred thousand infected machines? How do Slashdotters living in countries with repressive regimes (e.g. US under Bush) manage this?
9/11 was probably the most successful terrorist attack ever
trillions of dollars spent and we say "oh we are winning", dunno about you but if you feed money into a slot machine and nothing comes out you have LOST
They make a proxy request for a page that says "ok". If they get it, then it's not okay, I guess. Slashlogic :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
people like you are all about property rights. What people like you are more likely to do is put people like me in jail for my ideas or for behavior that does not fit your moral code, even when it only affects me.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
... fundamental constitutional rights... if an ISP hands over to the FBI such personal information of its users then the user have a right to know that and nothing but signing some NDA with the government (which must be disclosed withe the consumers of teh service) can circumvent that.
..... where any real terrorist will see it and realize teh BS... but still the innocent population becomes more careful of what it communicates via the internet... reducing teh task of analysis.... (but still not enough)
What is really going on here is FUD.
Face the fact that the NSA is totally incapable of analysing the mass of information going thru the interent. Its a technology problem that as technology becomes advanced enough to do it, it also is the technology to prevent it, or over burden its analitical abilty... of itself.
We have seen plenty example from the FUD of teh Bush Admin in beating war drums against a country for the illusion iof it having weapons of mass destruction.. where the real reason was oil.
Illusions.... FUD... The fear factor used in order to suppress...
But lets not forget the human idiot factor that seems to say it needs to set examples.... so expect some FBI agent or two to make a public case of some innocent party (they are so much easier to manipulate than a real threat) out to be a terrorist... so as to help promote the fear factor so to suppress using a media for terrorist communications
Because in reality.... that is the best they can actually do.
How can you be sure of this?
Its simple: Honesty need not hide.... as in an Open Source analogy (See SCO/MS vs. Linux --- and somethng MS was saying about Open Source and national security and economy of countries using it).
Really. You do business with an ISP owner who likes to talks about politics. All of a sudden, he becomes REAL quiet and looks scared all the time. D'oh.
The sad thing is, people will figure out who he is despite his best efforts, and the government WILL blame him.
is to make sure that privacy comes first in their products.
/. readers, most people do not have the time or knowledge to even look for these stuff. Why not advocate Freenet instead of seti@home?
Why these the default settings in Mozilla/FireFox:
- enable cookies 'for cuurent session only'
- a setting to clear cache on exit
- built in list of anonymous proxy
- advocate the usage of Freenet with icons on webpages and products (icons similar to the Mozilla, Netscape, or PGP icons on web pages and to the throbber in Mozilla/Netscape)
Although product as Freenet, Frost, GnuPG, PGP, (etc...) are known to most
This has been known all along,
where is the real information the luser who posted this story speaks about?
We all knew already that the govt only needed to ask and they shall receive...
This news article is spouting nothing new.
You just wasted 10 minutes of my time reading something that was already well known.
If we're worried that the government will lean on ISP's to spy on us, why aren't we worried that the ISP's won't surveil us themselves? It's their employees who have access to your identity, your password, your email, even, perhaps, your credit card or bank account numbers.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Still. How about getting out of your fucked up corner of the world and realising there's more to the world than your useless corner of the world? Ahh I guess no. Oh well, nevermind. Die in your own blood eh?
Suckers.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
... is mentioned early in the article. But it doesn't mention the religous fascists that want me dead.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
.... someone has to equate Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) as a terrorist practice.
Now.... who's the terrorist?
By the time you get a "National Security Letter", it's too late to complain on Slashdot about it, because you'll be under a gag order.
;-)
So instead, today you should make up a webpage stating basically what you've just said above: "I have never seen any requests for passwords or email from any law enforcement agency in my time working here." and post a link to it for us. That way, if you ever do get a NSL, then you don't have to violate your gag order and tell anyone about it, you just need to take down the webpage telling them the opposite and wait for people to notice.
The description of this case reminds me of two things. The almost farcial nature of many of the rules and regulations in Catch 22. Secondly the way trials were conducted in China when the Communists came to power. As my grandparents tell it, they'd put you on trial but the best thing is they *won't* tell you OR the public what the charge is! The assumption being that if the government puts you trial, obviously you are guilty and the whole point of the trial is to exact your public confession. To make it even better they were allowed to beat and torture you until you confess. The problem being that not knowing what the charge is, even if you wanted to falsely confess to stop them beating you, you couldn't! The only way around this is if you had contacts amongst the Communist officials who would tell you the charge so you could say "Yes, I stole Mr Lee's chickens last Saturday". You'd get punished, but at least you'd skip the whole beating and torture business. And of course the info on which the trial is based on were usually informants, of whom they never tell you who it is or what the details of the evidence were (as I said, they didn't even tell you the details of the charge) so that you have absolutely no chance of defending yourself against the evidence as you are not allowed to see any of the evidence!
Of course the details of what's going on in the US is doing is different from what my grandparent's described about China, but the whole farcial nature, the whole "Sorry we can't even talk about what the charge is." (at least the defendents are allowed to know), the whole beating and torture until you confess (Guantonomo Bay), the whole lack of oversight to prevent abuses, the whole "we can't allow you to see/challenge the evidence/witnesses" (that trial in the US right now with that guy connected to 9/11) seems very very similar. And with the recent torture cases in US prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan etc the US is sliding down a very slippery slope.
Not hardly; if anything, the mainstream media is pretty conservative.
Show me one article that proves this liberal "bias".
Or for that matter, give me a definition of "liberal".
the only way of not being watched,
is to speak openly about everything.
don't ever mind about any possible gov's mule spyer
Lluis Vila
... WITHOUT going through a normal ISP? I honestly do not know, outside my area of expertise. Say you have a normal POTS. Is it possible? What needs to be done? Any good tips or pointers or detailed pages out there, a link or two perhaps?
I ask because it seems like if there is, it might represent another way to add to a security level-perhaps, I really do not know. Either way it's an interesting question to me. This is a question for the ISP and networking geeks I guess, but reading this article made me think of it. It's something I thought about before, just this reminded me of that question.
Thanks in advance for any good replies.
There were al-quaeda in Iraq before the invasion. They were operating out of the north, and in fact, here is the great irony, under the very same protection of the same no-fly zone that was also keeping the kurds safe.
You may be interested in an article in which I pulled together some links: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government. It is still in rough draft form.
How soon we forget these two technologies?
Magic Lantern is the government virus that AV makers are told not to detect and remove. It logs keystrokes, steals passwords, monitors internet activity, etc.
Carnivore, or whatever it is called now, is that box the Feds put on almost every major ISP out there to monitor network traffic and forward the info to the Fed database. It uses packet sniffers, and checks for certain key words.
These technologies are still being used to Spy on US citizens, Green Card Holders, Visa holders, etc.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
A secret trial, warrantless seizures, sounds like Iraq was way better off before.
Part of the problem is a "damned if I do, damned if I don't" atmosphere in Washington for a president. If you implement things like the Patriot Act and increased spying you are dinged for eroding liberties and not living up to your country's ideals. If you *don't* implement them and something happens (aka 9-11) you are dinged for not "doing enough" and all your opponents open up multi-year inquisitions into why you didn't stop it.
Noone said after 9-11 "Well, that sucked. But that's the price of living in a free society. We could have engaged in massive spying and black ops and we could have made it a living hell for any Muslim to get on a plane but we didn't because we wanted freedom." No, instead we open up commissions and inquiries and try to assign blame
And note that this same process would have happened no matter if a Democrat or a Republican were in office. I can't imaging what kind of criticism Gore would have faced during 9-11 from the right. Most likely, something like "See you elected that spineless eco-hippy and he let THIS happen."
We need to drop this "us vs. them" attitude FACT. Otherwise our country is in serious trouble. It is not healthy for political discourse when you believe your side is the almighty righteous and the other side is Hitler reincarnated (Bush for lefties and Hilary for righties).
Brian EllenbergerThe Patriot Act is the public rollout of the NSA's Echelon system.
Can we really trust an article edited by a man named Alexandar Cockburn?
The secular dictators in the middle east are the sworn enemies of Islamic fundamentalists. Saddam Hussein (and Assad of Syria) are know to murder these folks.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
"Never has the ACLU needed your financial support more. Clearly, it is the only thing standing between us and our fascist government." My Gosh, my dictionary defines fascist as 'extreme right-wing totalitarian nationalist movement in Italy' (or similar) and totalitarian as 'one-party government requiring complete subservience to the state'. These are hardly descriptions of our America... shame to apply them , especially on Memorial Day!!! If we are in any danger of becoming a one-party government it is only because the democratic party has fallen into disarray because of it's continuing pursuit of lack of credability. And don't forget there are other smaller parties still! And the ACLU, if they did not do some good from time to time, we probably would have recognized there basic intellectual corruption ( read marxist beginnings and aims).
As someone who lived half of my life under a right-winged dictatorship, and the other half under a "corporate socialist democracy"* which reaps from infamous laws and practices usual under the dictatorship, the signs telling that the US is slowly becoming a dictatorship are unmistakable.
It seems that the only liberty left in the US is a statue in NY.
Please, stop this madness.
*"corporate socialist democracy": the president (and his cabinet) are members of the chilean socialist party, but that's it. It's just a bait to get people to vote for them. The goverment is just another puppet of [national and foreign] corporate interests.
No way the government can break into this secure box ;)
(Actually I just switched my desktop and notebook over to SuSE Linux 9.1)
Corporatism != Free Market
First off, I'm no fan of the PATRIOT Act. I hate it. I'd have no problems with it being used against foreign born terrorists (as all but one in our history have been).
/.er won't....
If "only applies to non US Citizens" were added to the PATRIOT Act, I'd be OK with it.
That said, I have to point out something the average
It's been almost three years since 9/11/01 without a terrorist attack against this country. If you or I had predicted that on 9/11, we'd have been called nuts.
So, obviously, what the government is doing is working. That is not to say that it doesn't need reform and more oversight (the secrecy scares the shit out of me), but you can't argue with the results.
However, I'm in a quandry. I am NOT an ends justifies the means person, but what if thousands of lives would be forefit if the PATRIOT Act went away?
Corporatism != Free Market
"this posting included" ? This is public access anyway.
And what version of the history books are you using?
He wanted to dominate the *world*, by his own words. And he was willing to do what ever was needed to accomplish this, including murdering millions of his OWN people.... ( Stalin was no different, only he pretended to be on our side for a while )
You don't call that a threat?
Flash forward to today.. Saddam was willing to murder hundreds of thousands of his own people.
And was also willing to assist those that would attack civilized nations..
Regardless of his immediate possesion of WMD's, he was a threat, and worthy of being taken out.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The first part tried to make us all go buy tin-foil hats, a bunch of scare tactics. The second part dealt with police overstepping their bounds, and the entire Justice System pissing all over the constitution, nothing new. I think the article just wanted to look "edgy" by mentioning the internet. The article was not so much about the internet, as it was about civil rights, a decidedly low-tech issue, the "surveillance on the internet" angle seems to be a red herring.
I hate sigs.
n/t
Right. They're all the same. Always have been, always will be.
* Carter tried to distance the US from dictators, took the Soviets at face value when they claimed to desire co-existence, and was shocked when they invaded Afghanistan.
* Reagan believed in the notion that it's better to have a dictator who is on our side than a totalitarian ruler opposed to us, and he pushed the Soviet Union to collapse by forcing them into an arms race they couldn't win.
* Bush 1 put together a very strong alliance to drive Saddam out of Kuwait, but didn't take over Iraq for fear of breaking the trust he had established with the Coalition partners.
* Clinton believed in working in close concert with America's European allies wherever possible, did not believe in unilateral "regime change," and deliberately limited the scope of operations against Serbia and in the Middle East, believing that effective use of American "soft power" ultimately provided better results than constant use of "hard power."
* Bush 2 eschewed long-standing European alliances and incorporated pre-emptive invasion and regime change as a core element in American foreign policy oriented almost exclusively around hard power. His post-liberation plans were based on faith-based intelligence and wishful thinking.
You're so right. No differences between them. Give up your right to vote, and let the knee-jerk flag-waving "Creationism is science" crowd take over America.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I assume that by "We had the same problems with drug dealers and cellphones", you don't support Free Market Economics, but instead believe in using "Law Enforcement Officers" to provide price supports?
STOP WASTING MY MONEY DAMNIT!
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
I've done lots of ad hoc research on prime numbers, primality proving, and whatnot.
I've come to the conclusion that using a symmetric cipher with a much smaller verifyable (I use the first handfull of prime numbers and one application of Fermat's Little Theorem) prime number (say 256 bits) and Diffie-Hellman as the 'key exchange' offers faster yet reasonable security over the monstrous sized 'primes' generated for RSA that's only likely gone through eight applications of the Miller-Rabin Test or so which is a probablistic test.
I wrote my own multiprecision integer package a while back and it generates 128-bit primes within 3 seconds in most cases. I've used UBASIC's ECM program to double check my work and found my resulting work to be correctly coded. The nice part about my package is that it is written in 100% C code (with help from VC++ CString) with no assembler trickery. The fun part is that my package makes it very easy (but drudgery for large tasks) to manually re-write standard C type integer computations and comparisons to the equivalent version using multiprecision intergers.
I've skimmed through other people's multiprecision code available on the Web and found them eminently verbose and somewhat confusing. I wrote mine with 'Keep It Simple, Stupid' in mind and searched the Web for the fastest, most straightforward algorithms possible to use to write it.
If you want to use crypto, and don't wan't to deal with the baggage and complexity of GPG/PGP give the handfull of code that is PCP a try. It advertises itself as:
Welcome to PCP
The Pure Crypto Project
based on Modular Exponentiation and RSA alone
It is written in PYTHON, but I was able to read it and translate one of it's routines into C for use with my multiprecision integer package.
Feel free to comment on this post. I am interested in reading what others have to say about the matters set forth in this post.
unlike the kids that died so rumsfeld and his criminals he could put another couple of zeros on his stock portfolio
A few key points:
What bothers me here is not that the goverment monitors internet usage, but rather the amount of censorship it is imposing.
You're joking, right?
We have one party with two heads. One head looks like an elephant, the other head looks like a donkey. To say that we have "other smaller parties" as if that negates our single-party system is like saying that Pokemon cards may threaten the US Dollar as acceptable payment notes because a couple of third graders have been spotted trading cards for candy bars at lunch.
Before you spout off about "Marxism" would you care to define it? Marx was all about giving the government the freedom and ability to do whatever needed to be done in the interest of protecting and equalizing the citizens. Isn't that what every major law enforcement bill over the last 15 years has been justified as: protecting and equalizing the citizens?
Please don't use Marx's name ever again.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
And I thought I was bad when it came to skepticism and pointing the finger at foul play, but now I don't feel that bad because all of you guys see it even better.
The WMD's were only one of many reasons put forth by the administration for justification of war.
Yes id feel better myself if they were found, but it was not the only reason we went back, and the other reasons were more then enough justification.
Concerning the first gulf war, no i cant answer why he was left in power.. I agree he should have been removed the first time.. Why we stopped 1/2 way is beyond me.
As far as other places that are more of a threat, they should be on the list too, and we had to start somewhere.. Due to his ties with Al Quaeda, it seems like a good place to me.
( I also re-read the original post, and he did say Hitler was a threat.. my mistake.. i read it too fast )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...You're self-hosted, as I am? I run everything for my domains, including authoritative DNS. The only things I get from my upstream ISP are a DSL data pipe and six static addresses.
I make no use of their servers at all, other than maintaining a backup E-mail box (which forwards to my servers in any case).
So what does the FBI do if someone is, effectively, their own ISP, but they're not providing service to anyone outside their immediate family (and one friend), nor reselling service?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Who is more dangerous, Saddam, messing only with people from his country or bush , who invades other countries and HAS WMD??? hmmmm. The one with more power decides who are the good guys and who are not.
Check out Website development, maintenance and accesibility cons
It's written by a leftist kook. Don't waste your time.
And if you haven't READ the Patriot Act, pleaase STFU. kthx.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Hey now, calm down there. Just because everyone and his grandmother has a blog and can write whatever they want doesn't mean it's a biased source. I'm sure the guy probably has a degree in knowing stuff not too mention his mood of the moment was weepy and he was listening to some barenaked ladies at teh time he decided to be political...
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
was Re:USA = China-Lite
FROM: VAST LEFT-WING CONSPIRACY
TO: USEFUL IDIOTS
SUBJ: TALKING POINT
The only thing Bill Clinton ever lied about was getting a blow job, so it must all be George Bush's fault.
Make sure our friends at ABC/CBS/NBC/CNN/NPR/NY Times/Washington Post/etc. don't remind people of this old story:
http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/981104
Emphasis added. You can read the actual indictment at http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1998/11/98110602_nlt.
Unfortunately, I could care less about politics, so all some agent in an underground bunker is looking at is a lot of pr0n and Slashdot with some Fark thrown in. Who knows, maybe my VNC connection ends with a monitor in their lunch room so they can have a read while munching whatever it is that spooks eat.
Just need to add a good anonymizing network and we'd be all set...
In spite of the fact that the debate about the alleged "War on Terror" is lively and informative, I think it represents a good bit of cyber-turfing in support of various non-domestic agendas.
The article is about the abuse of the US legislative, judicial, and enforcement power to silence and oppress american citizens, yet the bulk of the discussion seems to be about the war. It's a classic case of diversion, imo, depite the fact that many valid points are being made on other (arguably related) subjects.
"The Internet is made of cats."
I guess they want to know where I get all my free Pr0n too.
Every two years, the *entire* House of Representatives, and one third of the Senate, is up for re-election.
Slowly but surely the government is demanding more power, while the little guy can't say anything about it. Soon, more bad things will happen, such as more terrorist attacks and disasters. 9/11 was a testing ground, folks. People in NY state still look like they're in a state of shock, and the next time somethign big happens, between greed, and an ignorance of what to really do to aliviate the problem, the US Government will tighten the rules here yet again, and we will have even fewer rights.
Terrorists know this, and they're only attacking so that this happens. They're tring to incite a revolution here in the west, they know they cannot defeat us by invading so they're trying to get us to eat ourselves from the inside out. I just hope the people who matter wake up and see this before it is too late, or "United we Stand" will be a cry of irony rather than pride.
Osama Bin Laden is to politics what Darl McBride is to Open Source: Both are attacking with the hope that their enemy will collapse from within.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
You are getting sleepy.... very sleepy.... By the time I count to 3, you will be asleep.... 1.... 2.... 3....
Ok, now repeat after me, "You've got plenty of liberties." "We're not headed down a slippery slope of losing liberty and safety."
Snap out of it, man! Complacency has toppled the best of the best, whether it be a country's political system or a successful product or service! Those in power in government are always going to seek ways to increase their power and control over the populace. Government is inherently evil and dangerous, but it seems to be a necessary evil. That's why a good, solid system of checks and balances are crucial - and it's the job of every citizen to continuously push back when government pushes more control at them. Most countries in the world are examples of what happens when government gets what they want. Their citizens were either unable or unwilling to fight back (in many cases, they became complacent - with a "we'd never win if we fought them anyway" attitude).
That's the very reason you're able to stand there today as a Canadian or an American, look around at the rest of the world, and say "Hey, we've got FAR more rights than most people!" That doesn't mean it's time to sit down, "enjoy the good life" and let government ensure there's proportionately less of it for your next of kin!
The article and subjet really had me going untill I read this ....
Well, I'm sorry but if I actually believed that any money I give would go to fight this and not all the other causes and parties who I know the ACLU supports that I'm sure to disagree with (especially in an election year) - then I would have opened up my checkbook in 5 seconds flat. One example that comes to mind ... is the right to urinate on a crusifix on stage at the taxpayers expense - if anyone renembers that.
If you're really concerned about liberty, then you'd be far better off giving to the libertarian party or the EFF. But, as things are the way they are now, I would be very cautious that this here isn't a ploy to get people to fund all their other causes if not "left" party electorates.
for your voters registration?
That's right. All your base.
Conspiracy theorists are needed. Who else is willing to take random jabs in the hopes of finding something they had no real reason to know was there?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The answer is no, of course, because I just put it on the web site.
It's scary, however, that people are asking those questions. It seems that the U.S. is on a downward slide. Four years ago no one would question whether they should read an article, if they wanted to read it.
Last night on the Coast to Coast radio program, someone called up and said the whole attrocities in Iraq should be blamed on porn. The host (Art Bell, to those unfamiliar) just laughed at him.
That the colective human sentience can not make a unified decision deciding that this issue is either serious or stupid, is a strong argument that the nature of our sentience is not a survivability trait that is demonstrating an ability to preserve ourselves as a species. (side note... that's a pretty good run on sentence, no?) Anyway, I feel terrified, and other persons who are equally intelligent are finding this foolish. It is potentially a very serious issue. However we can not agree if there is a reason to neutralize this threat, or if it is a threat at all. Such above mentioned threat is not IMHO as nearly of challenging a threat as the abovementioned ability to as a species identify and assess such nebulous threats as is described in this and many other articles. I find this very depressing.
What audacity you have to suggest that the video of Nick Berg's greusome beheading was fake! Let me balance your extreme liberalism with some compassionate conservatism by rebuking your so-called arguments.
1. Nick Berg first arrived in Iraq in late December of 2003. He was killed in early May 2004. This is, approximately, 5 months. But he came back for a month and a half visit with his family so he was only in Iraq for 3 and a half months. Is it not possible that, in his 3 and a half months in Iraq, he did not learn enough of the language to understand what his murderers were saying? In all likelyhood, he probably had a translator with him most of the time. We Americans are ignorant and refuse to learn other languages; that is why everyone else must learn to speak English. Unfortunately, because not many captives had been killed at this time, Nick Berg most likely thought he was being held as a hostage bargaining chip and would be released shortly. In fact, his murderers even claim to have tried to talk with the U.S. military but that they refused to respond.
2. Obviously you have never manned a camera. From the footage in the video, it is apparent that in the beginning the camera is on a tripod. When they are preparing to behead him, one of the murderers is taking the camera in his hands. By the poor handling of the camera, one must conclude that this person was unexperienced in handling a camera. This accounts for both the shakiness and zooming we see, because it is akward for him to hold the camera and he does not know how to hold and operate it properly.
3. Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, there is not a huge gusher of blood spouting out of a person's neck when they are beheaded. Like someone already mentioned, it more or less just spills out onto the floor. From the footage, in my opinion there is an ample amount of blood on the floor to suggest that the video is, in fact, genuine.
How dare you raise questions about Nick Berg's murder when his family is still grieving over their loss. I am outraged by your insensitivities to the situation and demand an apology on behalf of the Berg family. God rest poor Nick Berg's soul, and keep watch over his family.
Yours truly,
Nick Berg's severed head
cause it sure as fuck isn't comcast
Quick! everyone switch to SELinux for maximum security! Encrypt everything you can! Take it to the man!
Oh wait. The Department of Defence helped make it, you say? There's always BSD...
SAILING MISHAP
I'm sure that even *pretending* to plan a terrorist attack is freakishly illegal now, and might have been before. Obviously if I post here saying:
"I want some people to help me bomb the Acme widget factory in Nowheresville, USA, for the glory of Bob Dobbs. Please e-mail me if you're interested."
I am unlikely to arouse any serious suspicion that I'm an actual terrorist. However, going so far as to design an actual plan, featuring real dates, times and places, will make you indistinguishable from an actual terrorist. At which point you are seriously f*cked, and will have zero human rights, possibly for a long long time.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Get a sense of history and some perspective. Also use Google to both look up and READ the source documentation
When the 'big bad' PATRIOT Act gets as bad as FDR's
Executive Order 9066 which resulted in concentration camps on US Soil give me a ring. Just hope the ACLU took some time from there Brie & Strawberry party with MoveOn to defend our gun rights (The Second Amendment Defends The First Amendment)
When the 'big bad' PATRIOT Act gets as bad as The Holocaust give me a ring. Just hope the ACLU took some time from there Brie & Strawberry party with MoveOn to defend our gun rights (The Second Amendment Defends The First Amendment)
Sending my check(s) to The Electronic Frontier Foundation not the hypocritical ACLU.
I believe Juanita
Wow. Another rah rah go go ACLU article on /.
Imagine that. What will the hopeless hippies come up with next.
The ACLU defends people that are useless wastes of skin. They also defend the occasional decent person. Although recently it seems useless wastes of skin are outnumbering decent people by 100:1.
If ever there was a time the ACLU needed less of our money now is it.
As soon as I started to do some bush bashing on the John Kerry Web site my computer started being attacked and then they tried to wipe it out with a Java Script routine that tries to over-write emory, flash ROMs and such. I've been running a locked-down FreeBSD machine with everything turned off except what is required to get on the net and i'm behind two firewalls. I put a packet sniffer on my network and cought an attack in progress. They were forging a web page of a site that I normally use with evil links to their server which downloaded a script which started a SSHv2 session with their server that went to a TLS session with a couple of cipher changes thrown in. It was encrypted so I can't tell exactly what they were doing but I figure they were downloading my browser cache and mail then they would try to trash my machine with a global overwrite. My screen would then turn into a bunch of multicolored pixels and lock-up. I did a whois on their ip nos and found they were registered to a major multinational oil corporation. So far they havn't been able to trash me but the'll be back with something more evil I expect.
Shields Up!!
I don't know about the rest of you, but I still remember the attacks of 9/11/2001. It seems that the absence of more attacks on the U.S. soil have allowed us to return to our very comfortable lives and resume writing our theories on life and government. NEWS FLASH : WE ARE AT WAR. The Islamo-fascists are all at war with US, but it seems that over half of the country has forgotten and chose NOT to be at war with these terrorists. You want definition of a terrorist? If you need a definition, then it's painfully obvious that you have forgotten about 9/11, and that says a lot about how GOOD life is in the USA, where the country could be AT WAR, but most of the population doesn't know or care, or has the freedom to speak out and demonstrate against our actions in this war which we did not seek.
How many years did it take US to transform Japan? How many years did it take US to transform Germany post WWII? And now we as a people expect Iraq to be transformed in less than a year? People, we still have troops in Japan and Germany. Again, it is a commentary on how good life is in the US, that we expect all our conflicts be resolved in either a half hour or an hour, or else it is regarded as a 'quagmire' and 'another Vietnam'. Americans lack patience, whereas our enemies are willing to wait for their chance to strike, so our government and the rest of us have to be ever vigilant, or suffer the consequences.
So to all of you who criticise the Bush administration for their policies, by all means please enlighen us with your plans to defeat terrorism. Perhaps you want to negotiate? How about converting to Islam/Wahabbism? Close our borders? National ID cards? Repeal Patriot Act so gov't agents can't effectively investigate suspects? Then when another attack happens, you will say, "somebody should have known, why did it have to happen?" The 9/11 commission has already concluded that the attacks could have been prevented - with what we learned after the attacks have taken place. Sounds like a serious case of tuesday and wednesday-afternoon quarterbacking. We should all realize that the terrorists only have to succeed one time, and they are patient. The US gov't/people have to succeed all the time, and we are very impatient.
Just imagine if we had the press of today covering the events of WWII, D-Day would have been a disaster and unnecessary bloodbath, and the battle of the Bulge would have been reported as a defeat. So try to have a sense of historical context here folks. The history of the world has always been periods of war followed by periods of relative calm and peace, and we are at war, and I pray that this period of war will be short, so we can all go back to our very comfy lives.
I DID read the original post, or wouldn't be commenting on it, would I?
Apparently I MIS-read it.. Hey it happens.
Apology? I don't think so.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Al Gore's speech last week touched on some of the issues here and I think he expressed them poignantly. Everyone should see this speech. video or audio.
"President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an "enemy combatant." Those are the magic words. If the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment.
Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then it's almost impossible for that person to prove his innocence - because he can't talk to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesn't even have the right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as "inalienable" can now be instantly stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by any other branch of government.
How do we feel about that? Is that OK?
Here's another recent change in our civil liberties: Now, if it wants to, the federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you - and they don't even have to show probable cause that you've done anything wrong. Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they're doing with the information. Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep them from reading the content of all your email.
Everybody fine with that?
If so, what about this next change?
For America's first 212 years, it used to be that if the police wanted to search your house, they had to be able to convince an independent judge to give them a search warrant and then (with rare exceptions) they had to go bang on your door and yell, "Open up!" Then, if you didn't quickly open up, they could knock the door down. Also, if they seized anything, they had to leave a list explaining what they had taken. That way, if it was all a terrible mistake (as it sometimes is) you could go and get your stuff back.
But that's all changed now. Starting two years ago, federal agents were given broad new statutory authority by the Patriot Act to "sneak and peak" in non-terrorism cases. They can secretly enter your home with no warning - whether you are there or not - and they can wait for months before telling you they were there. And it doesn't have to have any relationship to terrorism whatsoever. It applies to any garden-variety crime. And the new law makes it very easy to get around the need for a traditional warrant - simply by saying that searching your house might have some connection (even a remote one) to the investigation of some agent of a foreign power. Then they can go to another court, a secret court, that more or less has to give them a warrant whenever they ask.
Three weeks ago, in a speech at FBI Headquarters, President Bush went even further and formally proposed that the Attorney General be allowed to authorize subpoenas by administrative order, without the need for a warrant from any court.
What about the right to consult a lawyer if you're arrested? Is that important?
Attorney General Ashcroft has issued regulations authorizing the secret monitoring of attorney-client conversations on his say-so alone; bypassing procedures for obtaining prior judicial review for such monitoring in the rare instances when it was permitted in the past. Now, whoever is in custody has to assume that the government is always listening to c
It loads for me. Maybe you loaded it when it was being updated.
The article contains links to 25 books discussing the corruption. So, things are not that bad, if a large number of authors can write books about it. Many of the publishers are the biggest names in U.S. publishing, like Wiley and Scribner.
what some are trying to prevent? Before it happens?
That's right. All your base.
At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinburgh) had this to say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior.
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."
"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage."
I'm pretty sure we're right in around the apathy phase...
Now as this is a mainly yankee forum, I'd like express what I see is wrong with your country, though I've never been to USA and base my views on literature, internet, newspapers and TV. So why are you loosing your freedom? Lemme explain it from the beginning:
The problem number one and root of every other problem is the American dream: every individual is economically on it's own and everyone has the possibility to become rich one day, if you just work hard enough. That's why you don't allow too much social security ("get some work, you hippie! don't live on other people's money!"), taxing ("once earned money shouldn't be taken away") nor state controlled monopolies (even on fields like media nor health care) and instead give free hands to coroporations.
The problem is that the American dream is 100% BS. You have the system called capitalism. The #1 law of capitalism is that those who already have money make more money on the expnese of those who have fewer money, who become poorer. See it for yourself: play a few rounds of the Monopoly game with your friends. The natural sense of most people should say, that a system which gives more to those who already have and takes from those who don't, is unfair. But no, remember that we have the American dream: everyone is on his/her own and if you're not receiving enough material goods a) you're not just trying enough b) it's the will of Lord c) other BS. So just let the rich make their money and poors starve!
Now why are the people in USA not realizing that the system sucks and throwing those fat pigs away? Because the second law of libertarian capitalism says money=power. In USA even the medias like TV and the newspapers are free to markets. In most European countries there are state-controlled TV stations who don't go for market profit, but more like objective truth (i'm not saying that neither this system is best possible: the state may lie just like corporations, but this doesn't seem to be as frequent). When I open my local TV and they are airing american TV series or I go to cinema to watch an american movie, I see 90% times mind-controlling shit. Your media seems to want make people stupid sheeps who can be easily persuated to buying more stupid things or believeing the lies that your politicans feed you. Now please mind that the the politicans are also chosen by media: those who have enough money to commercials and close contact to media owners to persuade them to write/air good articles/news about them are chosen, because american people are mostly stupid as sheeps and vote the one who is praised in TV and the election is just a formality. Not every individual in USA is stupid, eg. most people in Slashdot seem much more aware than the avarage John Doe.
Because media is controlled by the rich class there is only one truth in USA: the truth of the rich. A good example of this mind-control: it was no long time ago when Michael Moore's movie critizing the Bush regieme was banned in USA. The supercapitalism is to blame: it has sold the truth and "democracy" for money.
We have an almost perfect system: the rich class has everyone else working to give them more money, media feeding the poor more lies and the power of everyone ("democracy") in the richs' hands. There remains one problem, though: the freedom. If people were really free and knew how bad they are treated, they'd kick the richs' asses. We have to rip people off their rights so that they keep on working for us. An example of which you see right in this article.
OK, the mechanics of the process isn't all that secret. It begins by using a provision of the US Code under 18 USC 1030(f) that requests the ISP to save information about a certain user (or IP address, or account, or whatever) in a pending criminal investigation. Section 1030(f) does not require that the ISP give the government a single byte of info, only save data that might otherwise be destroyed in the normal course of business, so that the government can take its time to get real authorization via a subpoena or warrant.
I'm sorry, but if you put Osama Bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein in a room together, Osama would rip Saddam's throat out in under two minutes.
These two entities, Al-Qaeda and the B'ath Party, were as far from each other on the spectrum as Timothy Leary and John Ashcroft. Hussein was a secular aristocratic illegitimate leader, while Osama is a fundamentalist populist exile.
In Osama's dreams Saddam gets deposed right after the US stops funding Israel and the House of Saud. We just gave him his wish early.
Are there 'links?' between the B'ath Party and Al-Qaeda? Not NEARLY as credible or numerous as there are 'links' between the current administration and Osama, or the current administration and the B'ath party. Who do you think gave intelligence to Saddam for his 'ruthless murder of innocents with WMDs'? Who do you think trained and armed the first incarnations of Al-Qaeda?
I'll tell you: the USA did, because our leaders' vision is limited to a MAXIMUM of eight years. I and all Americans have to take the full responsibility for the sins of our previous leaders. We could reduce terrorism a whole lot better if we stopped using our economic and millitary power to foist up terrible governments around the world and developed reasonable long-term foreign policy.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Well, I'm sorry but if I actually believed that any money I give would go to fight this and not all the other causes and parties who I know the ACLU supports that I'm sure to disagree with (especially in an election year) - then I would have opened up my checkbook in 5 seconds flat. One example that comes to mind ... is the right to urinate on a crusifix on stage at the taxpayers expense - if anyone renembers that.
You obviously don't get it.
Do you think civil liberties are instantly taken away from the most upstanding citizens first? Civil liberties are chipped away in little fragments over time, and the first victims are often the fringe elements that nobody seems to care about protecting. But each transgression of any individuals' civil liberties takes away a little bit from all of us. While you don't seem to understand this, luckily the ACLU does, and wants to unconditionally protect the civil rights of everyone, and not just you and your little self-righteous sphere of self absorbsion.
For example, back when talk of "the importance of 128 bit encryption in your browser" would have been met with blank stares by most organizations like the ACLU, the EFF was fighting for the right to real encryption. Privacy, technology and Carnivore? Or DRM and HDTV and the implications for Fair Use?
But like any non-profit, especially small non-profits, the EFF is limited by the amount of funding it has: they more you donate, the more cases they can take. So donate or volunteer now-- its your freedom of technological development insurance policy. It helps to ensure you can call someone who'll understand why your prosecution under the "2006 XYZ DRM Technobabble Here Act" has constitutional implications. The EFF was there for 2600 and Dmitry and many more. How many other organizations would have been ready to care about DeCSS or UCITA... not many. Other organizations get cases that 20 million people really care about. The EFF has taken cases that only a fraction of Slashdot cares about- but are still just as important. (Slashdot has 100's of thousands of readers. The EFF has an order of magnitude less members. Why haven't you joined? Quantity isn't everything, but it helps impress the congresscritters and it makes it more likely they can afford to take your case when you call them up. Take your case to the Supreme Court if needed.)
Parenthetically, 2600 wasn't an easy posterboy for programming rights case: neither the government nor the RIAA / MPAA / Disney conglomerates are ever going to be that nice. The EFF took the case anyways.
I wish there was a way to give money to the ACLU specifically to fight issues like this one. I've refrained from giving them money for almost two years now because I know that some of it would be spent to pursue loony-left agendas like religious repression and "affirmative action."
The ACLU has devolved into the legal branch of the democratic party, which itself devolved into the foreign branch of the Kremlin. Strangely this devolution continued and has even accelerated after the USSR collapsed. It just goes to show you that whenever there is a 5th column infiltration by your enemy, it can survive even after your enemy has otherwise beenn vanquished.
I remember what the ACLU used to be about, what it used to stand for. Once upon a time it was an organization that I admired and respected. Not anymore. I'm on their mailing list, so I get all of their promo, and some of it is almost as scary as anything the patriot act crowd has ever come up with. Not only do I get their promo, it seems like I get promo from every other loony-left organization. I never gave money to the Sierra Club, or the NAACP. I never contacted these groups in any way, yet I get mail from them regularly. Not to mention the subscription offers from The Nation (shudder). The fact that the ACLU would assume I was some dyed in the wool leftist just because I sent them some money in and of itself speaks volumes.
I believe in freedom. I believe in the ideals our country was founded upon. As such I see legislation like the "patriot" act for what it is, tyrrany. I'm far, far less worried about arabs crashing airplanes into skyscrapers than I am about Ashcroft and company destroying the legitimacy of our government by making it an enemy of the people. I'd love to find a group to fight this evil that I could feel good about supporting. As much as I'd love to support the ACLU in their fight against the "patriot" act and other such issues, I cannot in clear conscience give them money knowing the things that money might be used for instead.
If the ACLU will create a fund that is guaranteed to ONLY be spent fighting this issue, then I'll send the money today. But as long as there is the possibility that my money might be used to encourage racial discrimination or attack freedom of religion, then they'll never see a single cent from me.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
You, on the other hand have no real interest in the truth. Your decision as to whether or not the video was real was based on whether or not that would benifit Bush. Your points may or may not be correct, this would not be the first time someone was right for the wrong reasons. But this much is sure, you decided that the video was not a fake before any of the evidence was presented. This is about as wrong a reason as you can get.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Like your other respondant implied, I'm sure the ACLU would love to get cases where they're defending painters of apples and kittens and sad-faced clowns. The EFF would love to get "Ashcroft vs. Widows and Orphans Programming, Inc.". The government isn't that stupid- it'll send the worst looking cases first, to try to remove any public sympathy.
Someone please mod the parent post +Insightful. I don't think there is anything more insidiously dangerous to civil liberties than the logic that:
"Since you don't need that right, you shouldn't use that right; since you don't use that right, there's no point in you having that right; thus, since there's no point in you having that right, we'll just take that right away from you."Mod parent up. And then someone who understands how this was done go figure out whatever you can that was blacked out.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Sorry, there was a slight typographical error in the first version you seem to have read. The correct spelling of the patriotic motto should be: "Land of the fee, Home of the slave".
We apologize for any inconvenience!
Pardon me while I throw up, you Marx lover. Sorry, I had to use his name to make my point.
I don't want him to have them as hes a sadistic nut, but if he had them in the past and we took them away, it would make me feel better about the internationally derived 'information' that both the US and the UN had.
Not that its the deciding factor in my support for the war ( as explained earlier ), but it just would be nice to not have *any* questions about the motivation.
Also, that if the information sources were totally wrong about the WMDs, they could be wrong in the future about other things that could spell the difference.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You didn't make any point using Marx's name and I am certainly not a Marx lover. Marx, as an idealist, was nice but he steadfastly ignored that any implementation of his ideas would certainly fail due to the fallibility of human nature.
You used Marx's name because you wanted to play on the ignorance of most readers. I'm calling you on it. Feel free to define "Marxism" and show me how the current government in the US doesn't justify 90% of what it does by using Marxist ideals.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
can be art taken so much legally ?
<br>
and if I'm an abstract, modern, postmodern, multicultural, crazy, spiritual, artist ?
<br>
I will be in jail for my internet searches ?
<br>
<br><a href="http://www.lluisvila.com" title="Lluis Vila>Lluis Vila</a>
I think it nicely summarises all the civil liberties that were taken away.
I'm all for catching terrorists, but I have absolutely no reason to trust the government to treat me fairly. The government is run by mortals who will always be corrupted by power. This is simply too much unchecked power.
Sadaam murdered his own people with our knowledge and consent, so don't go looking for the high ground there. There is also absolutely no proof or evidence he offered any assistance to other countries for actions against the united states- much less terrorist groups. So say he was a bad guy, fine- but we're talking about a premptive war. About acting a nation that did not carry out any agressive act against us. That is fact. I would imagine a lot of countries could use that same justification to launch a "preemptive attack" against us. What would we call, though? Terrorism. The sanctions against Iraq killed more civilians than Sadaam could ever dream about. And no, he wasn't a threat to us. It feels good to think that he was- that this was justified- but he wasn't, and it isn't.
My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water.
I am not a lawyer but...
What if we get the ISP to change the protocol? "John Doe" being a one person shop could easily set up a script to email all patrons daily, that the FBI has not search the ISP's records for the subscriber. If the FBI does a search, the ISP quits sending the email.
I would gladly use an ISP who did this.
The patriot act automatically expires on 12.31.2005 if congress does NOTHiNG!
This is perhaps the best example of democracy in our times... a temporary act in desperate times (re: 9.11) designed to repeal itself.
There is not enough proof with just this video alone to say who did the killing, but that is in doubt. One thing that is 100% provable from analyzing this video is that it was staged. Read the second by second analysis below to see why. The only questions that really remain are these.
1. Why stage this if you actually did chop his head off?
2. If you didn't chop his head off then why stage this?
3. If you want to be known (by labeling your video with your own name) then why wear a mask and then have 2 seperate people reneact the cutting? (proved in analysis below that 2 people were involved with the head chopping/displaying)
4. If computers were used to make Nick Berg's death look more real (super imposed face over an actor's face during the cutting act) then how did the same camera get the orginal recording of his interview?
5. Considering the time lapse of 6 min 15 sec between Nick Berg's last statment and his head being lifted on display, why not use the original recording of his death instead of the staged one?
(by using the video time in the corner of the screen the time period of 6 min 15 sec can be determined to be true. Read the last section called what really happened)
FINALLY
6. If you did get Nick Berg's head, the same camera, his interview footage, and then faked his death (to cover up how he really died(in inTERRORgation perhaps?)) then why do such a crappy job of faking it?
Here's what the video shows.
-- VIDEO ANALYSIS, second by second.
13:26:24 --> 13:26:27
3/4 angle, Nick is sittin in a white chair camera at Nick's chest level. Nick says My name is Nick Berg, my father's name is Michael
2:18:33 --> 2:18:43
Camera cuts to nick sitting in white chair, front view,camera is at mouth height, cropped very proffessionally.
My mother's name is Susan I have a brother and sister, David and Sara.
[unitelligble]...live in Philidelphia.
[Arabic audio VO starts]
2:18:43 --> 2:18:43
[An Arabic voice starts speaking before Nick is off screen]
2:40:02 --> ( all the way to 2:44:41 the camera angle doesn't change nor does there appear to be any missing time)
There are 5 men standing. From left to right.
1. Red/white checkered scarf. Holding an AK 47
2. White scarf, holding a rifle on right shoulder, has green ammo belt around waste with shoulder straps.
3. Has a black ski mask, is the guy in the middle, has the papers and is the speaker. He's the one that pulls the knife
4. Black scarf, AK-47, Green ammo belt, identical to guy #2.
5. has black/white checkered scarf, AK 47, ammo belt like #2 & #4.
Guy #3 is talking in arabic, reading from a piece of paper, the front side of sheet 1 (he has 2 sheets)
2:42:19 --> 2:42:26
Guy #3 shuffles 2 papers that he is reading from in a
very bizzar manner. (sheet 1 is original top sheet)
19-21 : flips sheet 1 over and straightens with sheet 2, looks at the back side of sheet 2, decides against it.flips both over, looking at backside of sheet 1.
22-23 : takes sheet 2 flips it over on top of sheet 1. (currently viewing back of sheet 2, which he was just looking at a second ago and decided not to read.)
24-26 : shuffles, and takes sheet 2 and puts it behind sheet 1. All in all, with all this paper shuffling, he's right back to the back side of sheet 1, which he was looking at 5 seconds before.
This could be exused as odd behavior, but then...
2:42:39 |
Man coughs into hand but audio does not skip a beat. (this may be due to video compression issues)
Also, he coughs into a closed fist with his left hand. (though a weak argument, for some reason, coughing into his fist the way he does looks very western...)
2:42:40 --> 2:42:41
!! Guy #3 turns sheet 1 over again!! And is now reading from the original sheet he started reading from!! He's been reading for almost 3 minutes now and goes back to the original
Why the hell is this thing still on trial?
If I were the judge I would have ruled the act unconstitutional so fast that the defendant wouldn't even have time to say "national security".
The guy also seems to have an interesting blog albeit focused on his hobby ... studying the damage of the Eugenics Movement has done to humanity
I believe Juanita
It really could only be Lord Woodhouselee aka Alexander Fraser Tytler. There is no "The Fall of The Athenian Republic", though the quote might appear elsewhere in his work. But no one seems to no where. Snopes.com has some on this.
I actually like the quote, especially the first part, but I figured we should still be committed to truthfulness.
You have not refuted the fact that it was staged, something not mentioned in the news. But is a fact that would be obvious if you actually watched the video.
If one person cuts a head off and then the video stops recording, then have a second camera record a second person picking it up in the exact same location and pose, but they make it look like the same person did both actions at the same time, then to the people who are blind and naive (you) this looks like one person doing the killing.
To those with discerning minds, it looks like what it is, two people doing it, and then edited to make it look like one, which means it was staged.
Prove me wrong or look like a fucking idiot with your childish post.
No, if you ever read Marx he criticized whatever he found wrong in nineteen century capitalist society. He did not give out any recipes for future societies. That was done by Lenin and Mao.
If I'm going to be terrorized by someone, I'd rather it be by actual terrorists than by my own government. If they're going to take down my country, they're going to have to do it one building at a time, dammit, and I'll be casting votes based on it. I'm going to law school in Chicago in the fall, my rep is Danny Davis from the IL 7th. He voted against the PATRIOT Act, one of 66 NAY votes. Maybe you should check up on your rep and see how they're doing.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Actually I was referring not just to Iraq, but also to Afghanistan, and to the whole of our foreign policy. While Clinton enacted a directive that made it US policy to oust Saddam, Bush has made it US policy to oust whomever it pleases.
Maybe you and I mean different things when we say "pre-emptive". To me, the term means to attack another country when it has not directly attacked you. I understand and agree with your point that Saddam had been thumbing his nose at the world community for 12 years, but I don't believe that he was a greater threat to us in 2003 than he was in 2001 or 1999, or 1997... .
My use of the term "long-standing European alliances" may be a point of contention as well. I was thinking a little bit more broadly than you, in the sense that since Lafayette (remember him?), the French and Americans have been allies. I also would count Germany as a strong European ally - for most of the Cold War they were our primary bulwhark against Communism on the European continent. Some alliances require paper - others don't, or at least shouldn't.
I understand your anger at the French for selling Saddam weapons, but getting self-righteous about it isn't exactly helpful. After all, the US set him up in the first place, in an effort to offset the Revolutionary Iranian government. This is not the only time we have supported leaders whom we later had to remove. The French are not without fault, but Saddam the Slaughterer really only became our enemy after he screwed up by invading Kuwait. Our high horse isn't so tall.
Your assessment of the administration's post-war planning is charitable at best, and ignores the fact that there were many well-qualified people who attempted to help the administration plan for the post-invasion rebuilding, only to be rebuffed. In fact, the administration gunned down Gen. Shinseki when he told Congress that it would take far more troops than Rumsfeld committed to manage Iraq. To blame our own lack of planning on Saddam is to ignore a large body of evidence that very directly shows the administration's failure to plan properly.
You have leapt to the assumption that I hold a special place in my heart for Kerry, which I don't. As an aside, I don't know what "French-looking" means to you or why that has to do with anything, but I will be voting for him because I believe that his foreign policy will be more rational and ultimately useful in the war against reactionary terrorists than Bush's has been. You presume to know my background and my political inclinations, but I'd suggest to you that such inferences can be misleading at best.
One final note. Try posting as a member, rather than as an AC. More people will read your post if you do, and it will be easier to take your comments as more than just angry flaming.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
the New York Times ran that "article" about WMD "found" in Iraq? Or the other numerous times they lied during the run-up to the war? Wow, sounds incredibly liberal to me. Jackass. The mainstream media is conservative as fuck. And then convinces everyone that they are the "persecuted" and "truthful" medium. Damn it. Wake the fuck up. Get Bill O'Reilly's dick out of your ass.
Meaning I will not sell killing-parafenalia, nor fund terrorists to kill pinko commies.
Maybe Orson Wells was 20 years too early - instead of calling his story "1984", it should have been "2004"...
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Your average Joe User probably thinks his cellphones/GPSs/Navigation Systems/etc are really cool for telling HIM/HER where HE/SHE is... but, does Joe User ever stop to think that, well, now his/her government and probably 2 private companies now also know where he is?
Does Joe User really want his government knowing that yes, in fact, he was in that Adult video store on Thursday, 10 March, 2003 at precisely 11:54am? Probably not. But, Joe User probably just thinks his new gadgets are cool.
Easier communications and more sophisticated tracking devices will only lead to an invasion of privacy, just short of Feds busting into your house (or country) before you've even had the time to finish committing a crime.
Maybe hardware manufacturers were coerced (rather forced) into making tracking available in the microprocessors: (remember the early PIII's with IDs encoded in there?).
DONT track where my computer is sitting under the desk gathering dust etc... but hey, if that cellphones gonna make it easier to find me under a bunch of rubble next time I call 111 (911/999/000/110/whatever your emergency code is), then thats really cool!
Or what about some phones which detect which node you are closest to... thats almost creepy. Cool feature, or is big brother watching me a little too closely?.
I once stayed in a place in Auckland back in 2000 where my (at the time) Philips Savvy changed node depending on which part of the room I was in (I counted 7 different nodes in approx 3x4m space)
To quote Nullsoft on installation of Winamp (Since Versions even before 2.09): Allow anonymous usage statistics: Y/N. Stop bugging me: Y/N. Tell me - who would in their right mind answer Y then N?
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Listen to the comedy by Bill Hicks along the lines of the album "philosophy - the best of", specifically "sex on trial", "politics in america", and from another album (revelations) - "go back to bed america". you will all probably enjoy and agree with most of the concepts presented.
:) I dont know how much my upstream provider(s) would appreciate that :)
i would consider making the tracks available for download, apart from, well, i dont really want to use like, 50GB in a day
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
I'm not sure many people care whether you think they are idiots.