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Congress May Add Record Requirements to MySpace
An anonymous reader writes "CNet is reporting that Congress may be working to extend the record retention requirements they're already working on for ISPs to social networking sites. Sites such as MySpace or FaceBook would be required to hold onto content access records for an unspecified length of time." From the article: "In those meetings, Justice Department representatives went beyond the argument that data retention was necessary to protect children--and claimed it would aid in terrorism investigations as well. During Wednesday's hearing, politicians also claimed that social-networking sites were not doing enough to verify that their users who claimed to be a certain age were telling the truth. (Recent news reports have said that sex predators are using MySpace and similar sites to meet up with teens.)"
While the parents groups were in DC lobbying congress, their children were chatting with this really awesome guy who's only a few years older than they are, honest!
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5130742.stm
It's time we put a stop to these horrible predators.
In those meetings, Justice Department representatives went beyond the argument that data retention was necessary to protect children--and claimed it would aid in terrorism investigations as well.
What's going to stop freedom terrorism happening in our country? Bullshit, like this, is eating at the highly regarded morals *I* hold which are being left the fuck alone to do whatever the fuck I like w/o having to wonder "am I a terrorist?!"
The "Republicans" are happy to erode our media's rights to disseminate important information being withheld and to chastise them using "their" news outlets while the rest of us sit here whining in near silence.
I've always said that I'm no better than anyone else as I'm sitting here whining to the Slashdot community and not doing anything but when are we going to stand up and tell the Government to go fuck itself?
This will help terrorism? Does Osama have a MySpace profile??
I think the terrorists may have won, and they only had to kill a few thousand US citizens. What a shame. I wonder when single men will be required to produce ID if they walk past a public place where the children might be or where a terrorist attack would claim many lives.
Blar.
In those meetings, Justice Department representatives went beyond the argument that data retention was necessary to protect children--and claimed it would aid in terrorism investigations as well.
guys, you KNOW you're only required to use one of those. EITHER think of the children OR terrorists
this is over the top. someone might notice your tactics!
In other news:
I hear there's also a bill pending that will make posting fingerpaintings in kindergarten classrooms illegal, and that the Department of Homeland Security will be investigating all reports of graffiti for possible terrorist links.
I just thank god that all of this is making us so much safer and that we can rest assured that we'll never be attacked again. Those weird concepts such as freedom and liberty and privacy have always been overrated anyway.
I'm sorry, but why are the parents of these kids asking the age old questions of their kids???
Where are you going?
Who are you going with?
Who is going to be there?
What are you going to be doing?
Do I know these people? (If the parent doesn't know them, then they probably shouldn't let their kids hang out with them unsupervised!)
I mean what the hell people! It's not a website's responsibility to keep your kids away from predators, IT'S YOURS!
All teens? Even ones who are 18 and 19? Arnt those legally adults? Should records be kept on those folks as well? How do you prove they are 18 and 19 and not 12 or even 50? Should they then just retain all record for everyone 'just in case'? Sounds to me like it is just more information they want to put in the vast database of everyone in the US.
They really are so cute, so adorably innocent and naive, as they go about their daily business, chatting away to other people, getting crazy naive ideas in their inexperienced little heads. Of course they think what they're doing is right, but they just don't have the capacity or life experience to understand. If only we could gather them around, hug them, tell them it's all going to be okay as long as they stop for a moment and consider what they're doing, and educate them about the full, terrible impact their actions will have not only on themselves, but on everyone else around them. But, of course, they don't want to listen to wisdom, not at their age..
..I'm referring, of course, to the damn fool parents groups and lawmakers.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"During Wednesday's hearing, politicians also claimed that social-networking sites were not doing enough to verify that their users who claimed to be a certain age were telling the truth."
I wonder how politicians expect MySpace to verify a person's age. Perhaps they're going to force them to use the age verification that was used on those OLD Leisure Suit Larry games. If you don't know what I'm talking about, the old Leisure Suit Larry games (I'm talking 286 era) used to ask general knowledge questions before the game started, assuming that a person of 18 years of age or older would be able to answer them, and allow you to play the game if you answered a few questions correctly.
i can remember a few years back when it was the parent's resonsibility to watch their kid; when they would talk to them about stuff like this just like they would tell them to not talk to strangers, especially ones with candy.
did anyone ever sue a mall for being the place in which their child was abducted/abused/etc?
Those damn kids^Wterrorists with their flash, background music and 32 sized Comic Sans fonts have to be apprehended!
My EYES!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Terrorism is their trump card.
They'll keep spewing this BS to get what they want. In the cold war days, it was communism, now it's terrorism. I wonder what's next...
That the parents of today are convinced that they are no longer repsonsible for their own children, Why moniter video games when you can penalize the industry making them, why watch what your child does online , when you can simply put that problem off on the webamsters, The parties their blaming have no control over the kids, so... how is it that they can be without the repsonsiblity yet still have the gusto to claim it is someone elses fault? that is just way to lazy
Did someone say cake?
Can someone tell me how this is any of the business of Congress?
i on.articlei.html#section8
i on.billofrights.html#amendmentx
According to Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution this is NOT a function of the US Congress.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitut
And according to the 10th Amendment, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitut
Libertas in infinitum
As per the DOD: Terrorism is "the unlawful use of -- or threatened use of -- force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives."
If Terrorist hate freedom and the Western way of life, it would be their political goal to reduce or remove our freedoms.
And out wonderful government, while attempting to fight against the terrorist have been slowly erroding our rights and freedoms.
So the harder our government fights, the more the terrorist win. Our government has done more to destroy our way of life than any terrorist organization ever could.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The idea of common people making laws for the rest of the "common" folks is interesting and for the most part works. This however is one of those situations where it doesn't work. The common law maker has no idea the techical requirements / money / time / people it takes to store such vast amounts of information. What they are creating is an un-due burden on the service providers.
This is why we have the court system to hash this out. Should someone take this up and go to trail over it they can have experts / witnesses / employees / vendors to try to settle this out and show that it's a crazy request that really should have never passed.
I hope it doesn't get that far, but I still have faith in the "system" in order to right this. The reason I say that is, this is the government asking for something to be implimented, not private business asking for something to be implimented. If it were private businesses they would lobby and spend money to make it happen.
Wow, that's a stretch. Does anyone have a link to Osama Bin Laden's myspace profile? Or is he disguised as a 16 year old goth girl?
Well start telling these teens that they got what they deserved for being stupid? Blame the victim? Damn straight. If at 13, especially if you're a girl, you don't realize that people who are 20 or older and who are attracted to you and trying to hook up with you are bad people, you are one of hell of a daft future sheeple. You can blame the victim for letting themselves get into the situation while throwing away the key of the rapist who did it. Responsibility can be dispensed 100% for both people involved. The rapist was a POS, the victim not only walked right into it, but probably did their part to instigate it.
The reason that teens don't take responsibility is that we say "no one should ever be a victim." That's all well and good, but the world doesn't work in "shoulds." If you are 14 and hook up with a 25 year old, chances are, he or she wants to screw you silly. This is not an age of innocence. Don't give me that bullshit about teens not understanding sex. The average teen today knows more nuanced things about sex than most adults did 50 years ago!
"Our children" aren't being victimized. Our dumbass, horny teens are. They're old enough to know better. Show me a real kid, ie a person who is a prepubescent 11 year old or younger who has gotten really hurt this way. Where are all of the 7, 8, 9 and 10 year olds getting raped? Uh huh. It ain't children, just adolescents. People who are old enough to understand personal safety, even if they can't fully grok the ramifications of sex.
It's easy to verify over-18... there are various ids that can be used to provide some record which in 99% of cases will be close enough to the real person as to make it work for validation (think a kid using parents CC # to authenticate.. you can just call the parent up and confirm permission to use).
Under-18 though... there's no common ID in use. Which means that anyone over-18 can pretend to be under-18 at will. SO you can cut off access to adult services from kids... BUT you can't cut off access to kids services from adults.
Without further compromising the privacy and security via obscurity of the children in question.... through elaborate cross checking of credentials... there's no way to verify that a child is a child and not an adult pretending to be a child.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I know that in many of the blatantly neoconservative states on the US, the trend is to not encourage teens to be responsible. This manifests itself through the drinking age being 21, the age of consent being 18, and so forth. Meanwhile, in Europe and various other nations, such age limits are far lower, or even nonexistant. And what do we often see? Far more responsibility on behalf of those teens from areas where they are treated more maturely.
The problem isn't so much the predators, as it is the teens who have been shielded by their parents, and otherwise kept from learning about responsibility. For the most part, nobody forces them to give out personal information on the Internet. If they do, it's likely something they did completely on their own. If they then proceed to meet up with somebody who isn't a very nice person, that's again something they likely arranged on their own. The only way to stop such activity is to get the teens to smarted up, and to not provide their address to strangers, and to not agree to meet them in alleyways.
In the 1970s, we were always told in school not to get into a car with a stranger. And for the most part, it worked. There were a few stupid fucks who didn't heed such advice, of course. But in general, if you're open and honest with children and teens, they often will understand your concern. It's when you treat them like fools that they truly become fools, as we so often see in extremely restrictive places like Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and so forth. They won't learn responsibility in such an environment. And passing numerous data retention laws won't have any beneficial effect at all, because the root problem of stupid/ignorant/irresponsible teens is not being addressed.
How about all public corporations & all governments should be forced to record their meetings & keep them for a longer time period.
It seems obvious to me that there is significantly more malfeasance happening within corporate governence and 'coporate' government than is happening at MySpace.
I'd like to have earlier known about Enron, Cheney's secret energy task force meetings, Halliburton's war profiteering, etc.
Going after MySpace for terrorists & pedophiles is mis-directed force.
Seuss - I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends
that the goverment is using the excuse of terrorism to be able to index everything about those who post on social network sites?
scary...
Time magazine (I believe this week) had an article saying that the state attorney generals were meeting about the social networking issues.
It said that age verfication was a top priority for them and that the Connecticut AG said something like "if we could put someone on the moon, we can surely age verify users."
Just to show the collective brains of the people running the panic-show, they entertained using social security number verification for age verification purposes (the Time article said that the problem with that was the large quantity of non-US users, and that apparently nixed the idea.)
Nevertheless, requiring SSNs to open a Myspace or Xanga account would be a disaster on biblical grounds. Though I have a lot more faith in 14 year olds than the average person, I think having them interact with their SSN at all and needing to take responsibility for it would be problematic...not to mention, SSNs of minors is a phishers dream come true--just think about how many emails you'll get from "myspace" and "xanga" saying you need to verify your age to keep your account, so log in here and enter in your SSN and DOB.
While I agree that the most desired goal is religiously based, the administration (specificly Pres Bush) has stated that "Terrorists hate our freedom"
Here are a few other ways of looking at it:
Is the real freedom the administration of today want to take away is The Freedom To Not Have Conservative Christian Values?
Or is the administration themselves a terrorist threat as they use the threat of violence against individuals or property to intimidate society to achieve political objectives? True, they themselves are not perpetrating the violence, but they are saying things along the line of "vote for us, or there will be bloodshed." Sure, they wrap it up a little more pleasantly with things like, "Other political parties are pansies, only our political party care for your safety." But that sounds an awful lot like a protection racket coming from a neighborhood gang. "The police can't keep your store from burning down, only the Crazy 88s can protect you."
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It's amazing what media-hysteria can accomplish. There are millions of children without healthcare in the U.S., and Congress thinks it is a matter of the highest priority to worry about this overblown "OMG think of the children!!!" crap.
In addition, politicians proposed a slew of related measures this week, including blocking access to off-color Web sites for all Americans, dispatching "search and destroy" bots that would seek out illegal content, regulating search engines and targeting peer-to-peer networks.
Oh, great. That will work out well. Internet censorship ala China, here we come!
If it's illegal content, nothing happens until somebody sees it and reports it. That person should have saved a copy as part of the report.
I'd be happier if, for evidence reasons only, MySpace saved hashes of pages, which could then be used to prove that a saved page by someone else was actually on their site at a given time, without saving the actual page.
And what about the Google cache of MySpace? Is that redundant?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"They'll keep spewing this BS to get what they want. In the cold war days, it was communism, now it's terrorism. I wonder what's next..."
I vote for liberalism.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Well put.
Incidentally, there is a good manual for terrorists, that everyone should read: Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. It was written by the CIA for use by the Contras in Nicaragua; it really makes you think who the real terrorists fighting against the US population are.
If MySpace is used by predators to target teens, they should have a record retention policy.
Or parents can educate their kids about meeting people from myspace, and to be careful about how much detail they put on their account.
It also holds people more accountable to law enforcement too.
Like we don't already have enough laws to turn normal citizens into criminals.
If they have illegal information on there and they "delete" it before the cops see it, they data retention would be the only way for the police to get evidence.
Um, what exactly is 'illegal information'? Are you claiming it violates the law to know something? Wow, that's a pretty hard stance. Lets just solve all of our problems, and put an officer in every home.
fMRIs. New flavor of MRI machine that "determines" whethere you are lying. And perhaps eventually act as a crude mind scanning device as they learn more about the human brain. Coming... this year.
And the book "The Culture of Fear", which inspired Mike Moore to make "Bowling with Columbine", pretty much nails what's happened. America is ruled by fear, and fear makes money and power. Nothing new about that; people went to prison or were executed for being anarchists, atheists, sodomites, communists, socialists, jews, in one way or another, in the US for all its history. And let's not forget the biggest fear of all, used to manipulate us for over a hundred years: the dangerous blacks.
What's important is that the fear police have tools they've never had before, technological and legal. They've no laws to follow, so they can do what they like to us. And now with the internet and digital telephony and cheap surveillance and GPS, they can lock us into a prison that we can't escape. All for fear.
And none of those things will make us one bit "safer". There is no safety in life, and never will be. What we need is a rational ability to assign probabilty to risk, and fear accordingly. For instance, what are the odds of getting killed in your car opposed to being killed by "terrorists"? And why the discrepancy in response, other than stupidity on the part of the manipulated and cold calculated fear manipulation by those who will get infintite power and endless wealth making people "safe" from nearly nonexistent threats.
As proposed, this law will have a deeply chilling effect on free speech. Think of all the small discussion boards out there: the hobbyist-level phpBB sites, gaming chats, religious websites, political forums, etc. All of a sudden, their operators might face the same records burden that a MySpace will be forced to shoulder.
The commercial operators will find it worth their time to install logging software and find a way to make it convenient for the government to issue warrantless Patriot Act information seizures. But I can't imagine how Jill BulletinBoard and her quilting group will cope. They'll have to close, along with boards espousing minor political views -- anything that doesn't make enough money to justify the record-keeping, or where the operators lack technical expertise to make it happen.
So this law sucks. We all agree understand that child pornography and sexual predators are a problem on the Internet, but sweeping, First Amendment-smashing stuff like this is a bad answer.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I vote for liberalism.
I vote libertarian.
Oh, and for the record to the current regime:
FUCK YOU!
And yes, I do bear arms, am very well trained in gorilla combat, AND I'm willing to die for my freedoms.
----------------------
Cross that line sukka!
For that matter, how is an MMORPG different? I don't see any reason why this woudn't apply.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So who's gonna pay for this data retention?? If the government wants it backed up so bad, then they should probably supply the means for it. Who knew that 9/11 would cost us so much of our freedom?? I mean seriously everyone doesn't really care when they start taking away our rights slowly. "Hey its only a wiretap on my phone...no big deal." "Its only a government issued ID card that I must carry everywhere in public" Which slowly leads into "Its only a GPS tracker implanted into my brain, so the gov't knows where I am at all times...but its for my own saftey!! Those terrorists blew up the world trade center 10 years ago, no telling when they will strike again!" Seriously, the government has carried this 9/11 bullshit way too far, and now everyone is afraid of terrorism, so the government can do whatever they want, AND PEOPLE WELCOME IT!
Terrorism is "the unlawful use of -- or threatened use of -- force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives."
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, and John Adams were all terrorists or involved in terrorism according to this. Their revolution was "unlawful use of force or violence" according to British law. Their actions were against "individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments" in order to gain independence, definently a "political" and "ideological" objective.
- The terrorists want to take away our freedoms.
- The administration is taking away our freedoms.
- The administration is therefore doing the terrorists work for them.
there is a logical fallacy. The two "freedoms" are not the same thing. The administration is taking away what we usually call our "civil liberties". The terrorists we are fighting are trying to take away, as I said, the freedom to not be muslim, to live under something other than the Islamic Caliphate, to choose something other than being Muslim, Dhimmi, or dead.Terrorists don't care about "civil liberties" as such. They claim to care about creating the Islamic Caliphate, and taking it one step further, one can assume that they believe they will of course be running it, being Chosen by Allah and all that.
This is pretty close to objective truth, unless you really think that the Muslim terrorists really do just want to take your free speech away, and are willing to murder, kill, and even die just to strip of your civil liberties and for no other reason. If that's "flamebait", frankly that says more about the community or the moderator than me.
Thus, the argument is over-simplified and not really useful for thinking. The argument that "If our enemies want X, we must not give them X" (which is what this is trying for) is always oversimplified; to use that logic is to concede far too much control to the enemy. The question of whether or not a given civil liberty must be modified somehow is one that must be considered independently from whether "the terrorists" want it.
A couple of you lept to the conclusion that this therefore implies that I think civil liberty must be curtailed. That's even weaker thinking than the original argument; that an argument is bad does not imply that the conclusion is false! Plus I have an established history of being on the side of civil liberties; I ran a website about it for years. That means I want to see good arguments used all the more, and I dislike bad arguments that lead to conclusion I agree with all the more. There are good reasons not to curtail civil liberties. We don't need bad ones!
Way to jump to a conclusion there. Companies already have record retention legislation governing them, so that 'Big Brother' knows who imported what when, who ordered what, and so on. In fact, companies even keep your credit card numbers on file! Although that's not government accessible, the other stuff is. If you've ordered something in the last five years from a company, you bet your ass it's on record. I just spent my past week filing all that stuff away. It's not a breach of privacy, it's company records that I'm honestly surprised Myspace doesn't have. And besides, if you're looking for predators, you can't just look where the prey has been.
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
Now Ben, tell me all the ways the masked gun man with an AK-47 pointed at your head has destroyed your way of life. I mean, you can still go to work, raise a family, etc, the guy with the AK-47 pointed at you head the whole time hasn't prevented you from doing anything.
You just never know if, or when he will shoot. Same with the government. They have the power to detain you at the drop of the hat. The question I have for you is, do you wait until the gun man starts shooting to take his gun away? Do you wait for the government to start abusing there power before you place limits on them?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This has to be the holy grail of American lobbying... it appeals to both the "Won't somebody please think of the children!" crowd and the "If we don't pass this law... the terrorists win!" crowd.
Bravo!
The terrorists we are fighting are trying to take away, as I said, the freedom to not be muslim, to live under something other than the Islamic Caliphate, to choose something other than being Muslim, Dhimmi, or dead.
Except, the problem with that is that you're extrapolating the intentions of the Islamic Fundamentalist movement. They could give two shits about converting or ruling Christian, Jewish, or secular westerners. They don't want to create an Islamic theocracy in the U.S., Denmark, Russia, or Argentina.
They might be interested in taking away the freedoms of Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, etc., but they mostly just want the U.S. empire out of the Muslim world.
In other words, they actually don't hate our freedom to not be Muslim, and they don't hate our civil liberties either. They hate our presence. And so do a lot of Muslims, even though they may equally hate the Islamic fundamentalists.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Edward Abbey
When did our society become more about security than freedom? I'm Republican, and I believe that the government should be small and involved as little as possible in most matters. Why does anyone need to know who I'm e-mailing? What websites I visit? Whether or not I transfer files using BitTorrent? When I call my grandmother? That's completely unnecessary. I'm not a criminal! Child pornography is bad news, but it's hardly worth 100% government surveillance of every American. To be honest, I don't care who knows what about me - if some quack at the NSA wants to watch me take a shower they're welcome to it. I'm far more concerned what they do with that information. The problem is this: they can use that information to screw me. Let's say I'm applying for a job - they can tell my potential employer that I post negative blog comments about them on the internet in the past and I will not get the job and never know why. I don't care about privacy, I care about the transparency of the use of my data. Same goes a thousand fold for people who oppose a government or particular political party. Government officials can simply use their "private" information to completely destroy them. We know about these spy programs, what we don't know is what they're doing with the data they've obtained because it's "classified." Any idiot (terrorists included) knows that they're combing through it to identify terrorists and gain intelligence on terrorist activities, but without confirmation (at least of what is not being done with it) we can't assume anything. That's not acceptable. You can have my private data but in return I should have a right to know what is being done with it. And I seriously doubt that's going to happen. The United States government wants the best of both worlds - everyone's data and no transparency or oversight of how it's being used. That's absurd! I honestly don't think the average American realizes exactly how utterly and completely accessible everything they do is to the right people. If they did, politicians would be getting elected on privacy concerns instead of kiddie porn. At this rate of data security I forsee this scenario: Bob steals my identity. Bob accuses me of identity theft. Bob wins, I go to jail. I plan to run for office in a few years (not sure if I'm going local or state - or even which state I'm going to be in), I can assure you that there are at least some politicians who aren't senile or interested in a police state.
Haiku for you!
We are at war with terrorism. We have always been at war with terrorism.
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
First off, my apologies for your modding, I think you have a valid point that is worth discussing even if I don't agree with it. I also do not assume that since we do not agree that you are for the erosion of our rights.
However:
"The two "freedoms" are not the same thing." and "the freedom to not be Muslim, to live under something other than the Islamic Caliphate"
I'm sure you will find that many of the freedoms (civil liberties) we take for granted are pretty well opposed to under Islamic Caliphate. The difference between the administrations erosion of our civil liberties and Muslim extremists attacking Western societies is not the religion, the difference is who is in charge once those civil liberties are gone. Religion is just a mask and a tool, used to hide the ambitions and give a political movement a manifest destiny. I stand by my statement that the enabling goals of both groups are the same (reducing freedom) and the objective goals only differ in who stands on the podium once the smoke settles.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Before 9/11, this type of overreaching on the government was still somewhat kept in check.
Today, all the legislative or executive branch has to do is tack on the phrase, "it would aid in terrorism investigations" and poof, instant justification for abuse of our constitutional rights.
Right to privacy, right to free speech, all thrown out because we Americans (you Brits too) are sheep. We are told we are scared of terrorists, and therefore we act scared. And the government manipulates it, feeding the trolls and then benefiting from the hysteria. A wicked cycle that will ultimately be the downfall of the very freedoms we have paid blood for.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
Errr, didn't you get the memo? The 10th amendment is moot in light of the commerce clause.
Seriously though, while I think much of the reaction to this is a tad melodramatic, the potential for legislation like this to be enacted is exactly why it's important to help privacy-enhancing technologies reach critical mass -- e.g. Freenet, darknets, and Onion Routers.
Eventually, one's right to anonymity will only be secured by technological means, since governments will increasingly come together to counter it, regardless of their political philosophy. We should be teaching "ordinary folks" how to use these tools in much the same manner as we'd teach them to avoid phishing scams; their privacy is threatened in both cases.
Pi Ran Out
If you aren't happy with MySpace and the rules they play by, don't use them. Don't let your children use them. It should not be up to the government what information these people collect in order for you to use their site. The government doesn't make Disney World take your finger print before you enter the park, Disney World does that on their own. Same with the grocery store, or library, or local club. Make the government implement laws to "save the children" from an online service and physical commercial gathering places will follow.
If you really don't like how MySpace works, then start a company to rival them, with background checks and what not. Then see how little difference that makes when someone gets raped after meeting someone else on your site and you get sued.
Take care of your own damn children, and leave the government out of my life as much as possible.
Cheesy Movie Night
Sorry, I don't buy it.
I think they want a global caliphate in the same way we want a global democracy, which is to say it may be a nice talking point, but the logistics of it just don't work.
I don't think this is a smokescreen. I don't think this is an active goal of the islamists. And I don't buy your armchair psychology.
Of course, you may be right, but the threat of a global caliphate is right up there with the threat of "The northern migration of killer bees", which is to say- insubstantial. Now, we face a much higher risk of terrorist violence out of these folks, and I don't mean to trivialize that, but largely we are targetted because we are in their back yard.
I tend to think that our prior strategies of propping up secular authoritarians while encouraging isolation and international political structures was more effective. But then, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan stand out as failures of such policy.
Pax -- Ob
Sometime around 1980. I blame Reagan (Nancy, not Ronnie).
In the 1970s, oh man I miss the seventies. I really REALLY miss the seventies.
We had freedom. Freedom like nobody had before, and certainly like nobody had since. At least, nobody in THIS country.
You could smoke a joint and nobody cared. Not even the cops. Hell, if you got pulled over for spee^H^H^H^Hdriving too slow and they smelled reefer, they'd confiscate it. And smoke it themselves in their squad cars.
Rock and roll... oh man, like never before. Zepplin, Floyd, Hagar, Nugent...
And sex. Oh man, the sex. There were no untreatable STDs! We had myrad forms of birth control (many now gone, like the IUD) AND abortion had just been legalized. You could walk up to any woman you knew and say "wanna fuck?" without getting slapped or arrested! And chances were she'd say "sure, wanna smoke a joint first?"
Hell, even if you were a cowardly nerd who couldn't bring himself to ask a girl if she wanted to fuck, they'd ask YOU! I shit you not, young man. All true.
Then Reagan started his war on (some) drugs; the same war Nixon had tried to wage before being shooed out of office. And AIDS reared its ugly head.
The last time a woman asked me "wanna fuck?" was maybe 2 years ago, I couldn't because I didn't have a twenty in my pocket. AIDS killed the Free Love movement. It's harder than hell to get laid these days, especially if you're an old nerd who remembers the seventies.
And a thought struck me so hard I still have a knot on my head - I've only known ONE person who has died of AIDS. And he was gay.
AIDS isn't a sex disease, it's a BLOOD disease. You get it from sharing needles or from sodomy, as the anus wasn't exactly engineered to have stuff shoved up it. If someone with AIDS sodomizes you, you're probably going to catch it whether you're a man or a woman. Anal Intercourse Death Syndrome, one guy I knew called it.
If you suck on someone's cock or lick someone's pussy who has AIDS you're probably going to catch it, because you've probably got at least one dental cavity, or have burned your mouth at McDonalds, or have gum disease.
The only way to catch AIDS from straight penis vagina sex is if you have a scratch on your pecker or in your pussy.
Hell, I'm 54, I'm more likely to die of a heart attack in the middle of the sex act than catch AIDS from it. Well, actually I'm not likely to get laid at all... God I miss the seventies!
But the media and politicians still keep pushing the AIDS scare. How many heterosexuals do you know personally (Isaac Asimov and the guy from Queen don't count; you didn't know Asimov personally and Freddie was teh ghey and you didn't know him either) who have died of AIDS? Now how many do you know who have died from strokes, heart attacks, cancer, or car wrecks?
The parent poster is right. "cold calculated fear manipulation by those who will get infintite power and endless wealth making people 'safe' from nearly nonexistent threats."
We're nerds, we shouldn't be listening to this bullshit. We're supposed to be able to think for ourselves.
Yah, history shows that when the elites allow society to rot from the bottom up, that society becomes weaker over time as the productive people have to pick up more and more slack for all the unproductive people. Eventually that society becomes weak enough that it gets conquered internally through a revolution of the mob, or externally from a society which has its act together.
Parents should be held accountable for their children and the reason parents don't care as much anymore about raising their kids properly is our welfare state absolves them of the need to raise their children properlyas it is merely a crutch in shielding irresponsible parents from any responsibility or accountability in raising their children.
In the distant past before we had Social Security and Medicare, when you got old your children would take care of you ASSUMING YOU RAISED THEM CORRECTLY. If you didn't have any children, well then it was tough luck as an old maid or old miser since you should reap what you sow. If you did have children and you raised them to be a bunch of selfish pricks with no concept of loyalty to their family, community, and country, well then you got what you deserved in old age as a parent as well.
Nowadays, the baby boomers think they can run up the federal deficit, the trade debt, and force the younger generations to deal with tax rates that make their lives extremely uncomfortable, all the while big mommy government hands the old farts checks for social security and medicare when most of these old farts clearly do not deserve it. Instead of living the good life at the expense of their children, they should of invested in their children in the form of not just money, but time, values, and good parenting to raise the next generation of productive Americans. Instead, due to their bang-up job of parenting, their children tend to mostly have an identity that does not go much beyond "ME ME ME ME". Great job baby boomers in raising a bunch of spoiled brats who have no loyalty to you when you get older, especially when you all move to Florida to enjoy that "good life".
In older generations older people did retire, but yet they still kept contributing to their community in the form of charitable works, handing their institutional wisdom down through their family and community, and helping their children with parenting in the form of being good grandparents. Now, many old farts think it is OK to just pack their stuff, move south, and retire to the good life and not give a hoot about the future generations since half of them think the apolocalypse is coming soon anyways.
In addition, they let Congress and our presidents over the last 30 years turn the United States into a debtor nation that produces very little relative to what it actually consumes. Ships from around the world come to the United States to dump products at our ports that are destined for Wal-Mart and then head back home largely empty. Who is responsible for this insanity? Well as a generation you can blame it all on the baby boomers and their lack of personal responsibility for everything in the United States actually makes Soylent Green seem like a great idea.
Though many baby boomers will probably die and go off to the heavenly where they will be rejected by St. Peter for being selfish pricks who left future generations to deal with the aftermath of their decadence, they better hope they had their bodies cremated or else their descendants will likely make it a yearly ritual to dig up their corpses and violate them in anger of the country and world they have left behind.
So, how about we start holding parents accountable for how they raise their children, rather than just leave them all to the wolves for raising as we do now in our broken school systems, family court bureaucracy, and whatever mind-numbing socialization propaganda happens to be on television for any given day.