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How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World
slugo sent in this Wired story which opens, "A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it. ...International phone and internet traffic flows through the United States largely because of pricing models established more than 100 years ago... The United States, where the internet was invented, was also home to the first internet backbone. Combine that architectural advantage with the pricing disparity inherited from the phone networks, and the United States quickly became the center of cyberspace as the internet gained international penetration in the 1990s."
As a Swedish citizen, I feel so lucky that all my communications will be monitored by a government I can not influence through voting!
c++;
I, for one, do not welcome the casnning of my email by the USA, a country of which I am not a part and have no influence over. A country which is proving itself ever les freedom loving and ever more dubious over human rights and the rule of law (as it applies to governments, police, courts and the military).
Meh, guess I'll keep using ssh wherever possible.
i wonder how much data can be encrypted using Steganography in that infamous Goatse image
CIA can look at a gapping hole all day then for all i care!
Laying fiber across a countryside, much less an ocean requires corporate dollars. Even Gates, Ellison, etc. would notice a substantial hit to their pocket book if they funded a trans-oceanic cable. And, that cable has to be maintained. That cost money.
The point is, your internet communications are always going to in control of someone with a lot more money and susceptible and even beholden to political influence. Get used to it.
Encrypt your data if necessary (99.5% of it is no where near that important) and you're done.
What kills me is that a quarter to a half of the people who are up in arms about this publish their daily lives and personal details on blogs which Google, MSN and Yahoo immediately suck up. Yet it if the NSA wants to know whats going on... they go ape-sh*t. Here's a clue people... I don't talk about my private life on the intertubes... never have... never will.
Just check for the evil bit?
Having said that, I live in the Netherlands. I don't really see much reason to trust my own government any more than the US gov with my voice/data. If you're going to make super-secret communications, just don't send them unencrypted over a vast and dangerous network.
As european most of my european, russian and asian traffic rarely goes over US lines, maybe through US companies but still routers placed in Europe.
But Mr. NSA, if you really wanna listen in, could you please remove the spam for me?
This will continue as long as large numbers of religious leaders and religious voters continue to run the country. You have to understand that about half this country believes that we are in a religious war to defeat an unholy enemy and that on both sides of this religiously motivated war will do whatever it takes to win. This applies just as much to the Islamic fanatics of the Wahabi in Saudi Arabia, as it does to the Christian fanatics that are prevalent in the US Military such as Peter Pace, and Congress, like Orrin Hatch.
Do understand something about Christianity though. Keep in mind, I am a Secular Aignostic. I don't believe in Christian doctrines.
In the Bible, God didn't come down and be selected by two thirds majority. In the Bible, The ten commandments aren't Ten generally considered good ideas, they are commandments. To this end, A cataclysmic impass has occurred.
Whether God exists is sorta irrellevent to the discussion sadly.
All these doctrines call for the ahnialation of all the others. Now how people implement the philosophies may vary, and some interpretations cherry pick and are benign enough to be tolerant. But the doctrines are not Tolerant. Tolerance would be seen as weakness in the tone these doctrines and allow them to be undermined. So the doctrines in their purest form call for the suppression of all freedoms and the extermination of competing ideas. Christian people can be very tolerant. but the actual religion itself is incapable of being tolerant. The same is true of Islam. The doctrines are written in a depressingly genocidal way.
Well, why is this important to whats going on now? Well. we now have U.S. Style Jeffersonian democracy vs. Christianity. For doctrines like Christianity in our case and Islam in theirs, Jeffersonian Demoracy and Christianity are incompatible. In the U.S. enough Americans chose Jesus over the Constitution. There were enough Americans who felt that following the dictates of their God was so important that they put people in power who believed as they did that religion was simply more important, and were willing to cast the constitution aside. The prevailing sentiment was there was "Too much Freedom, not enough God" Christian doctrine is such that things like Freedom of speech, privacy, etc cannot be tolerated because they undermine the religion. As long as the US loves God/Jesus more than Freedom, no one will have freedom, because in both the Bible and the Quran, no one has any freedom.
We get the privilige of living in a freer society only when times are peaceful, and the religious doctrines can be safely "ignored for convienence". Because part of being free means you are free Not to follow the religion's wishes. As such, Religions like Christianity and Islam, and liberal free society are fundamentally incompatible. We elected leaders who ascribe to this, so our freedoms, such as our private telephone conversations are going to be monitored to keep an eye on the population of 'good Christians'. It doesn't end there. Thats just the tip of the iceburg
Pricing of products, plans for entering markets in the US etc? You're not concerned that information might make it into the hands of your competitors?
Deleted
Fine. You can have TCP/IP. Can we have the WWW back?
Its this stupid "We invented it" mentality that is horribly twisted thruths, that makes US people behave like overlords all the time.
Get a grip, complex technologgy isn't invented, hasnt been invented in this case, and sure as hell doesn't deserve the qualification "invented in the US".
How much do you earn each year?
Believe it or not, the second amendment was intended precisely for that purpose. It's not a question of *if* a government will get out of control, it's *WHEN* a government will get out of control. Owning firearms is one of the last points of defense for a democratic government.
The sad reality is, however, that the second amendment had been beaten to death and there is just about every imaginable exception written into law... some legal, some not, much unchallenged. The government is already out of control and now the only people who have the guns are criminals and the government for the most part. I fear...
There's no such thing as luck.
Why aren't any of your wackos blowing things up in protest at having their rights violated by Bush?
The perception among the right wing, and really, one that is fostered by various means by the administration to its supporters, is that all of these rights violations are being targeted exclusively towards muslims, so therefor its ok. In our mind, everything that is happening now is playing out as part of a larger conflict between christianity and islam and one that has been going for over a thousand years and now its heating up again. Bush doesn't have to publicly say that this is the case, and even if he denied, because he's one of "our guys", we tend to think he has to say nice things about islam even while the feds are listening in on every mosque they can.
So, if the government is wiretapping phone calls of a US Citizen back to Saudi Arabia or Oman, then yes, that is ok. But if the government is tapping calls of us, that would be a different story. Similarly, all of the detentions have been of islamic people. If the gov't were illegally detaining christians, that would be a different story. But they aren't, as far as anyone knows, or most assuredly the right wing would be blowing stuff up.
Obviously, Bush gets a huge benefit of the doubt because of this, and ironically, I think Hillary is smart enough to push some of those same buttons to and get herself into the holy war club. But, she's actually in a hard place - because if she expands the government, due to her leftist leanings, she's not going to be trusted, and if she contracts it, she's a traitor, because she wants to let the islamic people win. So, for her, really, the best thing would be for her people to signal (and they know how to do it), that Hillary will continue to go after islam... and you know what, Hillary HAS BEEN.
This is my sig.
I know it's fun to hop on the "let's hate the USA" parade, but come on.
/really/ think that every other country in the world doesn't monitor the communications systems that route through /their/ country?
Does anyone
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Those original pricing models were set by the government, to compensate for allowing AT&T to operate a monopoly in an essential industry. They were updated to be even more encouraging to attract foreign routing when the AT&T monopoly was broken up. Which breakup was also responsible for the fast, extensive and open growth of the Internet.
If AT&T had run its monopoly without government intervention to protect people and markets, the domestic infrastructure wouldn't have been so attractive.
Which makes the current recoup by AT&T of nearly all its monopoly such an obvious threat. And its secret collusion with its only competitor, Verizon, to wiretap us such an obviously perverted government role in assembling a cartel. And making selective prosecution of Qwest, because Qwest refused to collude with the cartel, one of the worst crimes (not involving torture or killing, at least as far as we know) that Bush has committed against us.
We got those privileges because we kept our telecom monopolies under control, and our government in the service of protecting the people. Now that Bush has reversed that system, egging on monopolies to use them against the people, our entire system is a nightmare.
Hear that, AT&T?
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make install -not war
"...he's not locking up any U.S. citizens without due process..."
Tell that to Mike Hawash, who was held incommunicado for weeks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hawash
'They are NOT tapping "any and everyone's communications."'
We don't know this. The "Patriot" Act prohibits people from notifying the citizen being spied upon.
"No freedoms of speech have been violated..."
Ever been detained in a "free speech" zone? No? You must be a Bush supporter.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it." Be's Jean-Louis Gass