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US Official Urges Americans To Reconsider Privacy
Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information. "Protecting anonymity isn't a fight that can be won. Anyone that's typed in their name on Google understands that," said Kerr. Kurt Opsahl of the EFF said Kerr ignores the distinction between sacrificing protection from an intrusive government and voluntarily disclosing information in exchange for a service. "There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties. We shouldn't have to give people the choice between taking advantage of modern communication tools and sacrificing their privacy." Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, requiring a court order for surveillance on U.S. soil. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.
I, for one, welcome the impending removal of our old tyrannical police-state masters. www.ronpaul2008.com
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
If google cannot find anything about you then you have misspelt your name.
If nothing comes up then you were switched at birth and can find information by typing in your correct name.
I only found out about this when I discovered my real birth name is inanimate carbon rod.
liqbase
"There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties."
The difference being that while I trust no one, I trust the government with the information even less, because they have the power to screw me over to such a greater degree.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
"Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people's private communications and financial information."
Yes, lets 'redfine' privacy to mean "we know what you do, we will just be responsible with the information"
if the US government--president, NSA, CIA, FBI--are willing to give up their secrecy.
What is intolerable, however, is for government officials to have a lot of information on private citizens, but for private citizens to have little information on the government.
"There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties."
Definitely. For one, I can choose not to interact with certain private parties if they piss me off. But I probably can't choose to ignore the government and have to interact with it on some level.
Also, private parties can't demand I hand over certain private information -- sure, they might decide not to do business with me, but the government seems to think it's priviledged to anything and everything since the Patriot Act. Good luck turning them down.
Now it's no longer based on evidence that a crime was done -- we are welcomed to the pre-emptive society. Pre-emptive wars. Pre-emptive invasion of my privacy (without warrant) based on crimes that might happen. I'm just waiting to be pre-emptively thrown in jail.
I find it interesting that this government official is trying to sell us on the government safeguarding our information. HAH! What a joke.
Next Spring, almost every state will have political caucuses and conventions which will set the state parties' platforms.
Attend your local caucus or convention and try to get elected as a delegate to the state convention.
Introduce resolutions that value freedom and privacy. Lobby to get them passed.
Send a message to Washington: Privacy is important. Anonymity is an essential part of privacy.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Also, about googling your own name; I just did that and although there were over 1.5 million results, none of them were about me as far as I could tell
I guess I should be relieved, although I'm kind of disappointed that I'm not important enough to have my privacy violated.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
-- Donald Kerr
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
-- Barry Goldwater
"Anyone that's typed in their name on Google understands that," said Kerr."
Great! We should give Kerr a dose of his own medicine by posting about how "Donald Kerr likes having sex with a sheep", "Donald Kerr was arrested for soliciting sex in a public washroom", "Donald Kerr was indicted for embezzling $5 million dollars", "Donald Kerr was convicted of sexually assaulting an 82-year-old woman after tazering her", "Donald Kerr helped funnel funds to Al-Quaida", "Donald Kerr was found wandering naked in a local park, claiming to have been abducted by aliens, who then probed his body", "Donald Kerr is a vocal proponent of scientology", "Donald Kerr is president of the Washington Brittney Speares fan club", "Donald Kerr controls a bot-net of 250,000 PCs", "Donald Kerr accepted 'gifts' of $4.5m from Microsoft", "Donald Kerr wants to track people via bluetooth".
After all, Google is now a "good source" for Donald Kerr.
(Note to the humour-impaired - the above is fair comment satire directed at a public officials' political policy statements, and in no way is an endorsement of Mr. Kerr's positions on privacy OR sex with a sheep)
And the penalties for it.
The Bush administration has shit all over the Constitution and this country. They have committed treason.
Yes, there is something fundamentally different: After they take away your rights and screw you over, they can get themselves immunity. Private businesses generally cannot do that.
This guy is basically advertising a surveilance state, were everybody has to trust the government without reserve. Not a good idea. Historically that has always lead to a catastrophy. Unfortunately there will not be any allied armies to free the US population. I advise to stop this now with all possible legal means. A free society has to live with a real risk of terrorism. That is what makes it free: People have the freedom to go bad. If you remove that freedom, you cause much, much more damage that terrorists ever could do directly. All this "war on terror" is really a power-grap in disguise by power-hungry people without even a shred of ethics. You do not want to be ruled by this type of evil.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
On the New Hampshire auto license plates reads one of my favorite sayings: Live Free, or Die. This man would rather capitulate, and is therefore lost.
We will struggle, those that believe in liberty and freedom, against the tides that would try to drown us with rationalisms, excuses, and the madness of fealty to the corrupt and mindless sycophants of government.
There was a reason the founding fathers worded their documents they way that they did-- there was another King George that tried to shove fealty down our throats. This minor duke in his administration would have us believe that liberty and freedom != anonymity. He is wrong.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Really, I don't need to read beyond this. Does the US have a privacy problem with personal data held by corporations without regulation? Yes. Does the US have a privacy problem with novel government surveillance methods without (serious) oversight? Hell Yes. Can one be used to excuse the other in any way shape or form? Hell no!
This guy should not be the standard bearer for the dialog that the US needs to have over privacy in the age of information technology.
For those of you who want to protect their privacy, I've made a light Firefox add-on which generates randomly some queries on Google to make your search profile noisier and less exploitable. The queries keywords are extracted from RSS flows so you can personalize them. Moreover, the program simulates some clicks on Google search results (and ads).
For further information go on: http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuzzy-search/
It's a beta version and any comments are appreciated.
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd waterboard us, you know.
Is Donald Kerr's house in Google StreetView? What's the link?
"so this kind of thing only works to screw with American citizens and accomplishes nothing of significance"
And this is news? America's biggest enemy is definitely within. It is lack of education and an easily terrified populace that can be manipulated with a few "support our troops" and "with us or agin' us" slogans.
I think Osama bin Laden hit the jackpot with his 9/11 attack. He spent some 19 lives and a few tens of thousands of dollars and in return, he, through the current moronic, paranoid, and opportunistic administration, has thoroughly destroyed what used to be the most powerful and respected Nation on earth.
What this guy Kerr and the rest of the Bush Regime and it's merry henchmen haven't figured out yet is that the real trick is to protect a free society without interfering with it's ability to function as one. This guy fits Mr. Justice Brandeis observation that the real encroachments on liberty come, "from men of zeal, but without understanding." This guy fits that cookie cutter perfectly-- his reach exceeds his grasp. And because that's common in government, they're fast becoming a bigger threat to the ordinary citizen than the often notional terrorists are.
If the government wants to change what privacy means to THEM, they need a constitutional amendment.
The "right of privacy" is a judicial construct. I'm not saying that it is a bad construct, but you'll never see the word "privacy" in the Constitution. In interpreting the 4th Amendment, the Supreme Court has constructed a Constitutional protection of privacy. Maybe the definition of "activist judges" depends on where you sit. Anyway, the courts have acknowledged that this is an implicit, rather than explicit right.
Legislative acts have also defined privacy in their own ways, but the term "privacy" is a difficult one to define with precision when we're dealing with electronic communications. If the limits of privacy are no longer defined by your physical presence, how far does your right to privacy extend? With so much of our lives being lived online, would excessive provisions for privacy actually extend the doctrine further than it was originally intended?
Another question: We place our trust in Google every time we use its services, but why do we place more trust in a profit-maximizing enterprise than in our own government? Ostensibly we can hold our government accountable through elections, but we have less influence on corporations. Sure, we have the power of the wallet, but when's the last time you saw an effective consumer boycott in the information economy?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
What scares us is that you shitheads let them get away with it. You almost impeached a president for lying about a blowjob, but you don't take down an administration that is actively dismantling everything your ancestors fought and died for.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is affirmed by the 9th Amendment, although the right exists independently of it.
You're the sort of person for whom the Bill of Rights was added, because you simply don't understand the concept. The Constitution gives the Federal Government no power to intrude on privacy, therefore the right is retained by the people.
-Alexander Hamilton, Federalist, no. 84
Much US "case law," isn't law (in the exact same sense that our current money doesn't have value). It's not founded on any pure principles of ethics or logic, despite the claims of weasly lawyers and congresscritters, but upon convenience and authority through force. It's a history of progressive ursurpations of powers not granted by the people, and is illegitimate. The king has no clothes.
That some judge states "black is white" doesn't make it so, and simply weakens any legitimacy the law once had.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The scariest part of all this is that according to google I died in an industrial accident a few years ago.
It was a shock when i discovered this, but thankfully measures have been put in place to ensure it never happens again.
liqbase
Government provisions for socialized health care do not inherently sacrifice privacy. What gives you that idea? As long as the hospitals (etc) abide to patient confidentiality, and the government pays for these hospitals (etc) to operate, there's no issue.
This is really far from an "all or nothing" debate. That's what the government wants you to believe: that in order to provide you with services, security and safety, we need to be able to get into every facet of your life. Don't let them convince you that's how it has to be.
There are choices to be made about everything. The government can provide health care without access to specific patient information. They can provide security without reading your email and listening to your phone calls. Do not for a second believe that one comes with the other. We have choices.
What?
So although the Ninth does get mentioned far more seldom than it should, its existence is critical and quite central to the current privacy debate. It has not been completely ignored.
If you're interested in reading a layman's introduction to the 'right to privacy' as it has developed through several major USSC cases, I might humbly suggest my own "Right to Privacy Primer" (text version) which I wrote a while back and recently updated.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It requires trusting the people who will be collecting the information. Experience proves that they are *NOT* trustworthy, and don't have your best interests at heart.
Even if you can't get total privacy, get what you can, and don't give up easily. Those who are trying to replace privacy with trusting large organizations are doing so because large organizations can be threatened by larger or more powerful (or even just more committed) organizations.
P.S.: Remember that "Do Not Call" list? That one shares your phone number with all telemarketers, so they'll know who not to call. It expires next year, and they've got your number.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.