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Details On Worldwide Surveillance and Filtering
An anonymous reader writes "Help Net Security is running an interview with Rafal Rohozinski, a founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, which investigates, exposes and analyzes Internet filtering and surveillance practices all over the world. Rafal provides insight on the process of assessing the state of surveillance and filtering in a particular country and discusses differences related to these issues in several regions, touching especially the United States and Europe. In the US, censorship is more difficult to implement if for no other reason than the court systems offer greater protections for freedom of speech. However, in both places surveillance is on the rise particularly as law-enforcement agencies become more adept at working in the cyber domain."
When we do it, it's to protect the children from porn and terrorism. When the godless commies do it, it's just plain evil.
Oblig XKCD
Now and then, I announce "I know you're listening" to empty rooms.
If I'm wrong, no one knows. And If I'm right, maybe I just freaked the hell out of some secret organization.
The sad thing is, we can thwart these efforts, and we have been able to thwart these efforts for a long time. The majority of people, however, do not care as much about thwarting efforts at surveillance as they do about convenience. It is too inconvenient to carry a thumb drive with some software and crypto keys around*; the extra steps of inserting that device into a computer and running the software on it is more than most people are willing to deal with.
* Yes I know that this is not as secure as keeping your crypto keys on your own hardware, but it goes a hell of a lot further than any current methods do, and would require a lot of resources on the part of the government to break across the board (e.g. a targeted attack would work, but if they are going to the effort of targeting an individual they are going to break the crypto anyway, perhaps using the drugs+wrench method).
Palm trees and 8
In the US, censorship is more difficult to implement if for no other reason than the court systems offer greater protections for freedom of speech.
In the US, there are big telecommunication carriers who illegally spy on American citizens, and they go scot-free. The law is a weak line of defense when the government colludes against it. When the "leaders" have set their minds on something, it's going to happen. Laws will be changed, circumvented and ignored. There must be a strong factual defense line. In the case of communication that's cryptography, privacy enhancing routing protocols, redundancy and networks in the hands of the people.
Its amazing how many state an federal police task forces just view web 2.0 sites. ;)
Sit in chat rooms, forums and social networking sites trying to connect nerds and geeks in pics to real life.
The interesting part is the push for IP to home address without warrant in Canada and no court needed sneak and peek 'try before you raid' bureaucratic options.
My view is the deep fear of random flash mobs on any given topic. The more cops can just watch, the more they can build connections into protest groups.
The problem is they are still playing from the Stasi handbook.
If you have so many people willing to face jail, Iraq fresh "cops", baton charges, gassing, tasering, FIT units, Long Range Acoustic Device (L-RAD), no fly lists for life and military fusion state and federal databases, its too late
If they want control back, do a cold war USA or West Germany.
Sedate the peasants with low wage jobs, cheap cars, short cheap holidays, cheap housing, free speech for all and the dream of a better life.
If they are chasing beads and mirrors all day, no need for tanks in the streets.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It has those protections because people are so sensitive about those backward steps. Once people stop caring so much (which may have already happened with most people), those freedoms will be eroded.
Palm trees and 8
Both Canada and Sweden have significant restrictions on what can be said in public.
They do this is the guise of protecting against "hate speech."
As opposed to the complete joke that is FOIA in the US, and the Patriot Act? The various porn regulations in the US, capriciously decided on a state-by-state basis? The DMCA? Software patents? Disney and the insanely extendend copyright laws? The very strange regulations in the US about publication of encryption technologies? "Hate speech" is an understandable concern both for crime prevention, and for free speech reasons. But in my opinion as an outsider, both Canada and Sweden are noticeably better about it.
For US citizens, the McCarthy era is still in living memory, for some of us. So are the 1960's and their repression of anti-Vietnam speech. I like to think we've progressed, and the Internet is very useful for getting around the current round of restrictions. But make no mistake, they still happen, sometimes in new guises.
"The State of World Liberty Project was founded in 2006 by Nick Wilson, an activist and co-founder of the Libertarian Reform Caucus, an organization working to turn the United States Libertarian Party into a viable political party."
Their compiled list is nonsensical at best, and relies primarily on nebulous ratings of "economic freedom" from well known right wing political groups - like the Heritage Foundation.
Also note, that if you discount the economic figures, the top dozen or so countries are scored closely enough to lack any statistical significance.
And the economic figures are all based on taxation - since libertarians have never met a tax they liked.
Further - without being intimately familiar with the culture of each country, I could not honestly evaluate them - and it's glaringly obvious that no effort was made to do so on the site you are promoting.
So in summary, you're flinging out weak, biased data to support a conclusion you've reached without making any reasonable effort to ascertain the actual facts.
I still remain unaware of any specific country with greater overall freedom than the US.
Nothing you've posted could rationally be expected to alter that fact.
Now here is a /. that I could wrap my arms around: pointers to research, tools, and good news. The country I live in comes up no evidence of filtering whatsoever. The Psiphon open source so far only has a windows installer/instructions as far as I can tell, but I guess as a project this may grow into something we can all use for protection...hard to see it right now however...more testing needed.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
I judiciously avoid terms that will make my internet experience suspect for the key word scanners. Words like Keyhole, Echelon, Einstein might cause notice of your inputs so just be care{click, dial tone}
Invenio via vel creo
...where men are women, women are men, and little girls are FBI agents running honeypots...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Perhaps not in the form of protecting us from communists but it will undoubtedly come back in one form or another. With complacency like yours it will come back even quicker.
The DMCA makes it illegal to publish an entirely open source DVD player. It effectively grants a limitless patent to the DVD CCA which controls who can make a DVD player and under what conditions. Software patents limit my ability to publish ideas I developed on my own having never heard of an obvious submarine patent that will bar me from publishing my software.
What makes you so sure the protesters did that? COINTELPRO was an FBI program in which agents infiltrated protest groups and started riots to make the group look bad, and to give the authorities an excuse to interfere with the group's free-speech rights.