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FBI Wants Authority To Filter Net Backbone
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, writes "There are places where criminal activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the backbone data, which is already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
The legal authority to block anything he can't read.
I would say "Welcome to Soviet America" but the feds have had the "we can do what we want in the name of protecting the country damn the Constitution" attitude off and on since the 1700s.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
will they pry my private encryption key passphrase.
Back around the turn of the millennium, the U.S.'s monitoring of Internet traffic was a big topic of discussion on the Internet, spurred on by James Bamford's Body of Secrets and the European Union's report on ECHELON facilities. Except for some of us Slashbots, the public seems to have lost interest in this troubling phenomenon.
Why break it? Just encrypt.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What if their combing leads me to a brush with the law? It could get hairy....
Invenio via vel creo
As has been mentioned already, the backbone operators can just just block encrypted data. We need to be more decentralized, like a jellyfish.
What?
Who sees that this could become a huge regulatory nightmare in the coming years for software developers? This will only be effective so long as either the public continues using mainstream protocols for most activities, and the protocols that the FBI wants to monitor don't get changed or replaced on a regular basis by those who don't want to be monitored. The eventual outcome, IMO, besides the obvious privacy, constitutional and financial issues involved in this would be a bridge between this mandate, the data retention mandate and CALEA causing all providers of IT products to comply to make their products easy for law enforcement to monitory, going so far as to outlaw the deployment of software that is capable of evading surveillance.
I for one DO NOT welcome our evil packet sniffing overlords.
I want my country and constitution back. These people have a lot of nerve to ask me for money to be able to read my private papers and correspondence.
Small steps, seemingly innocuous in and of themselves, but taken together, result in a total subversion of the intent of the founders.
Remind me again how any of this falls under the umbrella of rights protection with which the government was originally charged.
We need to be more decentralized
Who is we?
Why is it so easy to trash the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and so hard to put them back? What a bunch of assholes. They must have had the words "probable cause" surgically removed from their brains.
we will end no whine before its time
You have to know if the Feds are asking, it's because they are ready are doing.
Which also means they never stopped the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program or Echelon, the NSA worldwide digital interception program or Carnivore, the FBI US digital interception program.
Man, I bet they've got petabytes of freaky porn by now.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Backbone operators are unlikely to block encrypted data. That would bring down things like VPN and HTTPS which their corporate clients need. Even if they were selective in which encrypted data they block, there will be mistakes and workarounds. Encryption is still a good way to go, even if we had large mesh networks.
Developers: We can use your help.
Yeah, and I want to get laid and every five year old wants a pony. Unluckily for me and the five year old, however, the FBI is the only one likely to get their wish.
There are places where criminal activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country.
Yes, they'll solve all those murders, rapes, assaults, robberies, and other violence by monitoring the backbone.
While you're at it, why not tap all our phones and open all our postal mail as well? Hell, walk on into everyone's house looking for evidence of criminal activity! Why not?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
e'll-Way ust-jay se-uay ode-cay.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Your post advocates a
(X) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(X) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(X) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(X) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
It is my sincere belief and hope that we are far closer to ubiquitous ad hock wireless mesh networking than most people recognize.
This sort of shit just brings it closer.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Old system - the duly appointed authorities had to SUSPECT you of a crime ... and get sufficient evidence to convince a disinterested 3rd party (a judge) that there was a need for a warrant.
... just something you want to read about someone. Stalking ex's. Harassing people who do not respect you enough. Getting some info on that cutie you saw at the grocery store.
New system - skim through the LEGITIMATE transactions of EVERYONE hoping to find something criminal or actionable or
Fuck that.
Please tag 'badheadline', 'misleadingheadline' or 'kdawsonfud'.
This is not filtering, this is mining. Both are considered bad, but there is a difference.
--
If our only hope is wireless mesh, then we have had it. Mesh is one of those really cool, but over-hyped words...and I shudder every time I hear it. Mesh on a large scale like that would be one huge cluster...and if by cluster you mean cluster $%^&, then yes, that would describe what would happen perfectly.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
The problem I see with all these discussions of privacy vs. evil child porn is that there is no way to independently verify how big of a problem child porn on the internet really is.
The FBI would have you believe that it is a huge problem worth drastically expanding surveillance powers over. Yet compared to the 70s, when (afaik) there was legal child pornography being produced and sold, what is the production rate for this type of material today? Are there really any child pornography sites on the internet where people can pay to download child porn? (please no links)
I also worry that the focus of law enforcement's "war on child porn" is shifting from the visual depiction of young children actually engaged in sexual activity with adults, to (1) pictures of naked children not engaged in sexual activity, and (2) material that is made by teenagers themselves. The original intent of having an exception to the First Amendment for child pornography is being distorted. This is especially true when you consider that CGI child porn that is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing is illegal to possess (thanks to the PROTECT Act), and that people are being arrested for pasting pictures of children's heads on naked adult bodies: http://www.theledger.com/article/20080418/BREAKING/453898235.
"And be able to change the definition of 'Criminal' any time we feel like it."
I do not know in my right mind how, it became permissable for George Bush to undermine civil liberties in the same way that we always argued it was wrong for Democrats to do.
... To secure these liberties, governments are instituted among men", is under assault and in the name of a rival that frankly is not nearly the equal of the rivals that we have faced in the past. We overcame the British Empire to secure our independence. We fought the Barbary Pirates, our own Civil War, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany, and then put our cities on the nuclear firing line against the dark stain of Communism... and we NEVER once entertained turning America into a land of checkpoints and identity requests.
Liberty and Freedom do not care about political affiliations and political parties. If a federal practice is wrong, it is wrong regardless of which party does it. If we do not want Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama or Bill Clinton reading our e-mail, then we should not tolerate George Bush or John McCain doing it either. Doing so only undermines the very essence of the rule of law and the fabric of our democracy. It is the totalitarian regime that justifies itself through personality, not the free one.
We conservatives have many differences with our fellow liberal americans and we always will. However, the very thing that makes us American, the idea, as Jefferson said, "We are endowed with certain inalienable rights
What is going on now in our country is madness. America is not supposed to be a place where guys with machine guns are walking around train platforms, asking if you have a driver's license with federal approved features. America is not supposed to be the place where the government collects data on all of its citizens.
Yeah, the muzzies blew up the world trade center, and its sad that those people died. But, the British burned our nation's capital to the ground, the Germans sunk the Lusitania, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and captured an army of 80,000 men of ours. We've been attacked before and we'll be attacked again, and what makes America special is that we keep our freedoms, rather than surrender them.
There's a million dead soldiers rolling over in their graves because we have so easily surrendered every freedom they fought for. It's an insult to them, to our national heritage, to turn our country into some sort of crappy police state because a few muslims with box cutters give us the willies.
Support those candidates, regardless of party, that promise to end the Dept of Homeland Security, promise to repeal the USA PATRIOT ACT, and join me in a call for a Constitutional Amendment that bars the Federal Government from intercepting any electronic communications within its borders, unless it can prove before a court that those communications are with another nation with which the USA might be in a state of war.
This is my sig.
"the backbone operators can just just block encrypted data."
Email message:
Here's my vacation photos
a whole lot of mime-encoded binary that might have
a legal-looking jpeg header at the start.
How are they going to filter this exactly?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
George Walker Bush
Richard Bruce Cheney
Larry Edwin Craig
Oh, you wanted pictures, too. Okay. How about this one? The big banner says it all.
The people who have the most to fear from this are the politicians. After all, if the FBI can snoop it, guess what will inevitably follow? One word: Net-Watergate. Your political enemies won't cave in to your demands on that anti-terrorism bill? Threaten to expose that they visited hot-young-underage-nymphos-with-bags-over-their-heads-and-bushy-underarm-hair.com on twelve separate occasions in the last year.
Yikes.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If they are able to distinguish between encrypted data and JPEG images, the encryption used is seriously flawed.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
That's what they say anyway - and it might even be what they really mean. But the uses of this technology will expand and it's just a matter of time until what the monitors are looking for are "undesirable elements" as defined by the administration in power.
Imagine what J. Edgar Hoover would have done with this ability. How about Richard Nixon; breaking into the DNC to gather information got him in trouble - if he could have accomplished the same thing with a wiretap or two do you think he'd have hesitated?
Our Founding Fathers put limits on what government could do, insured the privacy of private spaces and generally did a pretty good job of creating a system that would resist the abuses of a power mad wanna-be dictator. It's sad to see these protections being dismantled; history is being ignored and it's going to repeat itself like it or not.
Get the word out and vote. Real change comes from knowledge. The Republicans are going to be run out of Washington on a rail but that won't matter if their replacements don't enforce the Bill of Rights. Vote for people who get it at every level of government, regardless of party affiliation. Write the representatives you already have and tell them what you think. People like RMS already have political action notes. Join or form your own civic group to get the word out and organize effective rights defense. There will always be people who attack your rights because it makes their lives easier but everyone is always better off when rights are protected. Make noise and the right kinds of things have a chance of happening.
What was said in the article was:
search capability utilizing filtersIt has nothing to do with filtering the traffic on the network, which implies blocking/removing valid packets. It only means implementing a search capability that can use keyword filters (like searching in the gnarled mess for the word "Kalashnikov").
It is bad that they are dumping all this data for perusal later, obviously. But what they are asking for in the article is just a better way to search around in that data. It's not really anything new.
You make assumptions. Backbone operators won't block anything that stops commerce, and yes the bad guys will use the protocols and encryption methods that the good guys are using if they need to.
Also, by "backbone" the slashdot article writer was also being presumptuous. The FBI director was talking about stopping bad guys at their "choke point", and Ars Technica gave their own interpretation of what he meant by candidly assuming he meant an Internet backbone (or "hub"). Yes the US government can and does access these hubs (illegally perhaps, that is something the courts may not have the executive power to decide). The FBI also presumably wants access to the information that the NSA does (talk about information sharing between disparate government agencies!). Alas, however, a "choke point" could very well just mean the initial spotting (or IP address, gateway, etc) of a botnet virus that could be garnered from more liberal eavesdropping laws. Let's not make assumptions (in the article topic) and take them as is.
George Walker Bush
Richard Bruce Cheney
Larry Edwin Craig
Oh, you wanted pictures, too. Okay. How about this one? The big banner says it all.
The people who have the most to fear from this are the politicians. After all, if the FBI can snoop it, guess what will inevitably follow? One word: Net-Watergate. Your political enemies won't cave in to your demands on that anti-terrorism bill? Threaten to expose that they visited hot-young-underage-nymphos-with-bags-over-their-heads-and-bushy-underarm-hair.com on twelve separate occasions in the last year.
Yikes.
Or just claim they did. Remember, anything digital can be faked.>> "There are places where criminal activity is centralized..."
Yes there are. The White House, NSA, Dept of Homeland Security.
You speak for all of us, my friend.
Security (and in this case privacy) is only as good as the weakest link (which is almost always the people using these products). So for example, if you are a terrorist (or a democracy activist) wanting to use these anonymous resources to meet up with people in person, then you've pretty much blown your privacy.
Also, I don't see any reason why you couldn't use these technologies on a private (or semi-private) wireless mesh network. I can't see wireless mesh being in itself more secure than using something like Tor. It depends on how it's setup I suppose.
Has anyone used any of the variety of openVPN providers located outside the country? This is getting asinine and for just general web browsing I'm considering this. My concern is : Those openVPN places could just as easily be fronts for our feds or even worse, fronts for identity thieves, etc.
Besides, if this is allowed how long before RIAA, MPAA, etc tries to get authority to sniff packets. Or Comcast starts doing it on their own.
I'm right there with you. I keep hoping there will be something for our brand of conservative to band around. Although the title sounds un-conservative, there is a book that just hit the bookstores this week that I think maybe we can use to rally the old conservatives and save this dying experiment in freedom.
But, since there is some illegal activity among the billions of data transactions online, law enforcement (specifically, the Executive Branch) insists on having access to all data.
I'm certain that some of the cars zooming down I-80 across Chicago are involved in some illegal activity. Does that mean that every car should be stopped and searched? It's possible that in one of the houses or apartments on my block there is something illegal to some extent going on. Should the FBI have open access to all the residences then?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sadly it's not just a Republican or Democrat issue. The Patriot act, communications decency act, etc were all pretty bi-lateral. The Bush administration have clawed their way to a lot of executive privileges and trampling of rights, far more than any other president. However the Congress hasn't done much complaining. Where are the changes the Dem's promised when they took back the house?
There are a few individuals who are good on privacy and the rule of the constitution. This election cycle I can think of Paul (R) and Kucinich (D) as candidates who didn't get the attention they deserved since they weren't soundbite only types of people. Upholding the constitution doesn't seem to be generally a popular topic for people when they vote.
The EFF and EPIC are good places to visit regularly, especially EPIC's bill track.
The biggest ad hock mesh I know if is Meraki's San Fran Mesh. However with the feds having CALEA hanging over every open hotspot, I don't see alternates really growing that well. What average person is going to be able to comply with the real time snooping/sniffing/auditing requirements, let alone sweat the 10,000 a day fine, just to let others use the Internet? If it's not plug and play simplicity it's not going to happen.
And , given the nature the net works , blocking encrypted data on one backbone , will just make at pass trough an other backbone to reach it's destination.
Plus , even if it would work , it wouldn't help them , since people would start to use other methods to get things done .
Another thing i am thinking about : I'm sure it's easy to detect unencrypted traffic , as one can just apply a filter on it .
Encrypted traffic however , can be hard to identify .
Imagine sending an encrypted file . It will be binary , just like any other file .
So it won't be possible to know the file is encrypted .
One could also send a regular looking file ( like an image ) , wich would obviously never be blocked.
Slipping shoelaces ?
That reminds me, I once had a (few) interviews with an "off shore" (and a rather large multi-billion dollar) bank (I never got the job, but it came damn close). They never marketed themselves as an "offshore" bank, but the more questions I asked during the interviews it became apparent. One question I asked about the bank's history is that they evolved from various European banks and financial industries during the Nazi era to elude government (Nazi) interference. To this day this bank (and I'm sure many others) are still active in keeping the flow of cash moving. When it all comes down to the bottom line money talks. History and more specifically economics will show that creating artificial barriers to commerce (however illegal that commerce may be) will never work.
How about "Al Qaida?" It's more accurate than "the muzzies," it's less wildly broad in who it blames for 9/11, and it's even shorter to type. But maybe it doesn't achieve your goal of projecting hate at the whole of the Muslim world
The choice was deliberate. Let's assume for a moment that the vast majority of muslims do in fact hate the west. They don't like our liberal society, they don't like that globalization is forcing a re-examination of their own values and the don't even have a good relationship with christian countries - having been fighting them for 1500 years. Let's assume that we all hate each and other and that all of the above is true.
Take all of that, and ask - is is really that big of a threat? That's what I'm asking... and I'm saying, the answer is NO.
This isn't like Soviet Communism toppling regimes left and right. There's no Muslim equivalent of a Red Army putting 200 million people under occupation or a Wermacht invading all of Europe. This islamic threat can't even project food and water in their own borders, let alone have an industrial complex capable of funding a modern army like the Germans, Japanese, or Russians could. In fact, militarily, if it came right down to it, all of the Islamic armies combined could not even fight France.
I mean, last time I checked, the USA has 13 large aircraft carriers, plus around 20-30 smaller ones, a bunch of nuclear submarines, guided missile cruisers and destroyers, and then, if we got really bored, we have a couple of Iowa class battleships that we could reactivate. Add to that a few thousand combat aircraft...
What's Iran going to attack all that with? They couldn't even decisively defeat Iraq after ten years of fighting and we did that in a month.
It's like the whole idea of some vast Muslim threat is utterly ludicrous.
This is my sig.
Kindly see his response to my post. He deliberately selected a slur.
Brush up on your ability to detect the bigots.
You speak for all of us, my friend.
Because we let this go on amongst ourselves for way too long. We were the ones that identified, as Reagan said, "The government is the problem"... we were the ones that argued against the IRS, and a host of other government regulations on the grounds that they were an attack on state and ultimately individual sovereignty and would lead to a police state.
But, wow, Bush gets in, we get into a war, and the next thing you know, we actually HAVE the makings of an institutionalized police state, and we just say "oh, ok, but its to fight the terrorists.." It's the weakest excuse ever.
Now, we know that its been almost a decade where the legal framework that created this monster was enacted in the wake of 9/11, and, we're in serious danger of institutionalizing it. It's crazy talk. I mean, guys at a train station with machine guns, live automatic weapons. WTF is up the that.
This is my sig.
Gee. All the mail goes through the post office. Maybe the FBI should filter everything there. And phone calls go through central exchanges, so the FBI should be able to wiretap all phone call. Dollar-wise, I would say a lot more illegal and/or terrorist "messages" are passed though voice than through the internet.
Or is it just that the internet is relatively new technology [compared with the telephone and mail].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I'm certain that some of the cars zooming down I-80 across Chicago are involved in some illegal activity. Does that mean that every car should be stopped and searched? It's possible that in one of the houses or apartments on my block there is something illegal to some extent going on. Should the FBI have open access to all the residences then?
Just yesterday, there was the sentiment expressed that hunting pedophiles should trump privacy. At one time that post was up to +4 insightful. Slashdotters tend to be very protective of online privacy rights, far more so than the average American, I suspect that the reasoning expressed in that post would have appealed strongly to most Americans. So all that needs to happen to make this go forward to for someone to say that the FBI tap is needed to stop the pedophiles and it's a done deal. Anyone who opposes FBI internet filtering is a child rapist. Any private citizen using encryption is a baby touching terrorist.
We are all just people.
It is rapidly reaching a point where we'll all be afraid of what we say and do on the net for fear it'll go in our little yellow folder in some government office and used against us when we dare go against the group-think. How sad is it when we are rapidly approaching the day when our world behaves like that joke from Airplane II "Four alarm fire make way for GLORIOUS new tractor factory!". No matter how offensive and disgusting the power grab the media will be touting how great it is for us and most of the country will go along with whatever the TV tells them to. But that is my 02c on the subject,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I find it also fascinating that if you presented this in non-internet terms, the citizens would be up in arms.
Here's another example that might be more obvious to the ordinary citizen:
"There are places where criminal voice communication is centralized: the telephone switches located in central offices across the country. All of the telephone network's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off the signals. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the content of all the telephone calls, which are already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If they think they need a baby monitor to listen in on us.
Here's my vacation photos:
a whole lot of mime-encoded binary that might have
a legal-looking jpeg header at the start.
How are they going to filter this exactly? By the time that you start having to think that way, you have already lost.
Must I remind all those who don't find stuff like this to be at least a little bit disheartening the following passage from what should be a very important document to all Americans:
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
What is really ironic in these times is that to many, "general public and espicially those in power", that my belief in and my quoting that passage probably makes me out to be some bad guy.
These days however if you were to believe in or propose such a thing that our government, the very government founded and established by this document would likely want to question you, harrass you, publicly ruin you, arrest you, deem you an enemy of the state and so on.
Does anyone believe the people of this country could ever rise up again or truly take a stand against our government?
I just don't think its possible anymore.
We will slowly loose our rights as is evident by what has been happening. People will become compliacent in things. People will continue to use and believe the "if you have nothing to hide" argument which in turn just means those that don't believe that (small minority) are simply quacks or nut jobs or criminals looking for a way to maintain their evil ways.
And of course if you even bring up the notion of forming a new government, well your just a non-american, non-patriotic, commie ass and if you don't like this country you should leave.
I suppose the only thing left is for the oil to run out one day, financial crisis looms, those in power and those running the country loose their money / wealth, the military machine and might crumbles with no oil. The people rise, and who knows. Sounds like a mix of movie themes there, who knows it might happen. Oil is pretty much the foundation of everything currently. Its sort of like what water is to life, oil is to industry and the life we all know. It would explain the middle east and why our politico's are so concerned with it the people there right? ;-) Could they be afraid of loosing this resource, and thus what their whole fortunes and futures are based on? Could that be why the prices are going up and these companies are making crazy profits? Maybe they are stock piling money for the inevitable day when it all dries up? And of course the more you can take from everyone else, the less they have and the harder their lives are to sustain and become increasingly depend on those with to give them a helping hand and thus willing to become obidient little lambs to their overlords.
This is especially true when you consider that CGI child porn that is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing is illegal to possess (thanks to the PROTECT Act), and that people are being arrested for pasting pictures of children's heads on naked adult bodies:
It's worse than that. At least one person has been prosecuted for writing fiction with pedophilic themes. It's all just thoughtcrime, and pedophiles appear to be the backup boogeyman just in case the sheep stop being afraid on cue whenever their masters say 'terrorists'.
Or better yet: don't waste your time voting and instead start acting like the original Constitution still applied, everyday. Take measures not to be caught at it of course, but encourage your friends and family to stop giving the law and the gov'n'ment credit where it deserves none. Start building the world you wish to live in, by living as if it was there already and inviting other people to join in. You don't have any rights if you don't use them, but the corollary is true too.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I guess my point is, if a significant enough number of people are doing it, it's no longer a fringe network but becomes a backbone in and of itself, and the same thing happens over again. So why keep re-inventing the wheel only to abandon it when you should be addressing the perceived issue at hand?
Just food for thought.