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Assange: Facebook 'the Most Appalling Spy Machine' Ever
i4u points out an interview with Julian Assange in which the controversial WikiLeaks spokesman calls Facebook "the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented." He continues,
"Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use. Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them."
for knowing every inane thought that crosses the mind of people I only vaguely care anything about.
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Cool! Now we can use you as part of the Human CentiPad!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Where did he tell you to do anything but understand?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
He's not talking to you, you prick. He's raising public awareness. Get over yourself.
You need to stop putting words in other people's mouths.
I suspect that the relatively brief period between the breakdown of the 'symmetric transparency' of village and smaller social groups and the rise of the 'asymmetric transparency' of rationalized, technocratic surveillance will be looked back upon as a curious historical anomaly.
I choose not to be on Facebook because I don't want my friends to see me doing something embarrassing.
I don't care what the faceless "agencies" know about me because I have nothing to hide from them, and it won't embarrass me if they know my dirty secrets, as long as they don't tell my dirty secrets to my friends.
The fun part is that Assange is considered a criminal by most of the people he's trying to help. Oh, the irony.
Its funny but a device, the computer, that many clever people developed to free us and improve our lives is ruining our privacy and harming our freedoms. Even governments and their agencies are afraid, wikipedia allowed them to be spied on in an industrial scale, police are weary of cell phones with cameras etc.
The guy who wants all information to be accessible to everyone is complaining the biggest collections of information are too accessible?
No, you got it wrong. He stands for open governments, not people. That's a big difference.
Facebook is like a reverse Wikileaks, leaking the general public's personal information back to shady corporations and government organisations. They really do have a detailed map of your digital life, and they keep all of it - the record goes all the way back to when you joined. A database of the lives 640 million people worldwide... the fact this information is so poorly protected is deeply concerning. Once you put information up there you don't get it back. I've said it before: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1946656&cid=34845420
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It may be quite obvious with Facebook, but the fact is most people don't know how pervasive data-mining is. Still, me, I kind of trust our intelligence community at the moment. I expect CIA and SIGINT for National Security reasons, and I've met enough of them--higher-ups and lower-ups--that I know they're good people trying to do a good job. I still think we need someone with the keys, because in twenty years the culture could change completely, but right now, US Intelligence is staffed by fairly good people.
Law enforcement use is more normatively questionable to me, since I tend to take an expansive view of the Fourth Amendment. For example, if they lower constitutional rights in NY to allow cops to search bags for explosives, I don't think they should be able to arrest people if they find drugs, since their rights have been artificially suspended because of terrorism, unless they can point to reasons they would have searched the person anyway. (apologies for antecedent potpurri.) But unfortunately I think law enforcement use of Facebook and such is largely constitutional under Maryland v. Smith and related cases. (I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information I communicate to others, like Facebook or the Phone Company.)
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
>>>is considered a criminal by most of the people he's trying to help
Well as he says, "Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance." Most of the people are simply ignorant of how they are being lied to by politicians, and controlled. - "And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone â" itâ(TM)snot understanding what actually is going on in the world. It's only when you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now, the question is, who is promoting ignorance? Well, those organizations that try to keep things secret, and those organizations which distort true information to make it false or misrepresentative. In this latter category, it is bad media.
"One of the hopeful things that Iâ(TM)ve discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means that basically populations don't like wars, and populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don't willingly, with open eyes, go into a war. So if we have a good media environment, then we also have a peaceful environment."
This man sounds a lot like Alex Jones.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Since Facebook users volunteer up the information that pretty much makes it public information.
Seriously, I don't care if you know that I'm at the book store buying a coffee. If I don't want this information to be public I don't post it. Problem solved.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Ain't nothin' on my Facebook but my name, my friends, and my random attempts at being witty. I don't care if the gov't sees any of it. If I did, it wouldn't be on Facebook. The problem isn't Facebook, it's that people -- including Assange, actually -- have a binary idea of security and trust. They think something is either totally secret and revealing it would be a huge betrayal, or it's all out there in the wind open to everyone. If you think Facebook is a privacy threat, you don't have to stop using it: just stop posting private stuff to it.
Trust is multilayered. I have stuff I only tell my close friends. I have stuff I only tell my Warcraft guild. I have stuff I only tell my wife. I have stuff I keep entirely inside my head. And none of that stuff goes on Facebook. Facebook is fine for some sorts of privacy -- for instance, as a college professor, I don't Facebook friend my students, so I don't have to worry about saying something unbecoming of a professor. For other sorts of things, I use other sorts of communications.
But I've been living in this sort of multilayered online privacy world for two decades now. Hopefully someday soon the rest of the planet will figure out how it works, so I don't have to deal with Assange's paranoid ranting, or college students who can't get a job because they're naked and/or vomiting on their profile page.
"Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them."
Excellent, so by playing Farmville I'm not only reducing my taxes (because they'd build the database anyway), but also contributing to the safety and counter terrorism efforts of my country.
It's not only addictive, but patriotic.
He isn't telling you what you should or should not do. He's telling you what you should KNOW before you hit that accept button.
As news have shown time and time again, most people do not read privacy policy of facebook, and do not think of consequences of facebook information availability.
That's philosophy of openness is fine, so long as you don't fall on the government's "undesirables" list. Like those folk who were blacklisted simply because they belonged to the communist party. Or had the unfortunate status of being japanese from 1942 to 46.
Or get "extra" attention by highway patrols because they are Harley riders, or DWB (driving while black). Or suspected downloaders of porn. "We don't know if he's a pedophile, but by god he's downloaded a lot of nude images. Surely one of those girls LOOKS underage, and we can frame him for it. Oh look - he's bought japanese comics of underage boys and girls from ebay. Book him."
Or posting a "sexual" photo to facebook when you're only 17 years and 11 months. Sexting is a favorite of overzealous prudes in prosecutors' offices. (Or horror - an 18 year old boy dating a 17 year old junior.)
Et cetera, et cetera.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
we offer this little video: http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/
The point is not in "hiding from government", but not allowing your personal friendships into easy view of people with potentially dangerous agendas.
You may or may not know that your friend is now an activist for a political movement that government doesn't like for example. Before, there was no way for them to tell about your level of friendship, and they wouldn't have the man power to investigate every human contact he has. Now, they go to facebook, collect the information on friendships and have a nice list of additional suspects to fine comb through.
In this regard, it's the ease of availability that is dangerous to the user. This is a change on similar scale to telephones, and wiretapping that came with it. It allows for centralised data collection on a level that was impossible before.
I think I might have heard YOU are a rapist.
See, now you can be an alleged rapist too!
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
Thanks for playing.
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/
>>>alleged rapist
Only in Europe could 2 women voluntarily have sex with a single man, enjoy themselves, and then a week later say, "I was raped," and the police take her seriously. I thought Europe was more progressive than backwards USA, what with nude television and beaches and such, but I guess not.
Anybody with any intelligence (i.e. not you) realizes this was a FRAME job, because woman #1 learned about woman #2, got jealous, and they both decided to "get even" with the man. It's a classic case of buyer's remorse.
In the US this case would be laughed out of court.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
You see, I've never been able to understand this sort of thinking. Why, if ignorance is such an objective evil, are there people actively trying to promote it? If populations never willingly go into a war, then why do we ever go into wars? Is it the case that the situations which justify a war never exist, but are some kind of fantasy? If so, why do people who supposedly have access to the "genuine" information still insist on going to war? Is it merely because it is in their best interest? If so, why is it always in the best interest of those who can be well informed without media intervention and always in the worst interest of people who cannot? It seems to me that this philosophy explicitly posits a good guys vs. bad guys cosmology, and the idea that the soul of mankind would be pure and lily white if it were free of these unseen Illuminati who have apparently raided the secret stash of evil that God keeps in the back of the fridge, out of reach of everyone below a certain income bracket. That worldview smells too much like shit for me to believe, no matter how much hippie-charisma it has.
Your examples suck.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
>>>If populations never willingly go into a war, then why do we ever go into wars?
Same reason Obama drug us into Libya (or Bush into Iraq).
Because he can.
And damn what the people think (most are against the war). Of course the real power to enter war is supposed to be with the People, as represented by their representatives in Congress. Unfortunately Congress is about as powerless today, as the Roman Senate was under the caesars. The Republic has fallen. The emperor has risen. (And I don't just mean this one example - the Executive has been ignoring congress a lot lately.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I really don't care. Facebook and other social media tools, web-sites, location tracking cell-phones - don't really bother me. I've done nothing wrong, don't plan on doing anything wrong, so if they want to track my life - go for it. It's quit boring.
Says the almighty and infamous AC....swimming deep in the seas of irony I see...
If you HAVE to use a social network, use Crabgrass. It's developed by our friends over at riseup (we.riseup.net), so we know it's safe!
Your not being spied on for nothing. This week end 50 facebook pages from anti cuts and anti austerity movements were pulled down, so freedom of speech in this case.
That is, until your dirty secret becomes illegal. Poker anyone?
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
This will not protect your privacy against government intelligence, but at least against most else. Do the BIG logoff from facebook by disabling you account instead of just logging off. Data is kept, and you can enable the account just by logging back in. A few seconds extra to log out, and your information is not shared.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
...If Big Brother wants access to my Facebook information, I'd be more offended that my taxpayer dollars are being wasted on such a frivolity than any 'invasion of privacy.'...
When you really think about the logistics and expense involved in tracking someone down and doing an investigation, having some young intel analyst sit behind a desk and with a few mouse clicks find out just as much information on you in about 20 minutes is likely a hell of a lot cheaper on the taxpayer than spending days or weeks doing intel gathering the "old fashioned" way.
Personally, I worry more about what various businesses can find out about me and other FaceBook users than I do about the government. The 4th Amendment works fairly well at keeping the government from doing "fishing expeditions" and I don't have a problem with the government getting access to data if they have a warrant based on probable cause. These restrictions don't apply to businesses that buy their way into FB to do data mining or that create cute little applications that require that you reveal everything to them in return for accessing the application.
I consider very carefully whether or not to reveal any personal information on FB beyond what I need to "show" so that people can find me. Most of this information is publicly available (i.e., phone book type stuff). It just isn't linked to me on FB where it can also be linked to my "friends." I'm going to do what I can to keep it that way.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
"Seriously, who gave the right to decide national security policy to Assange rather than, you know, that government we elected democratically?"
He's not an american citizen. He doesn't need to ask our government's position.
This space available.
Only in Europe could 2 women voluntarily have sex with a single man, enjoy themselves, and then a week later say, "I was raped," and the police take her seriously. I thought Europe was more progressive than backwards USA, what with nude television and beaches and such, but I guess not.
My understanding is that Assange's enemies scoured the Swedish law books until they found an obscure, seldom-invoked clause that they could use against him. The charges are very unusual, even within their own jurisdiction.
Breakfast served all day!
He can't get fame and fortune from revealing secrets if they're already all over Facebook.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Who is spying on me? Facebook has their own rules and regulations on what is acceptable and what is not. If you violate their guidelines they will delete the page. They set that policy not the government. And finally no one is required to use Facebook. They are volunteering their life stories with no coercion by the government. Invoking freedom of speech on this type of activity is a distortion of the 1st amendment. Either obey the Facebook rules or go somewhere else. Facebook is not the only access point where you can exercise your freedom of speech.
The same reason people use drugs, or go to religious services
The easiest way to feel good about yourself is to put down others. By putting down someone else you make them beneath you thus you are better than them, and thus you can feel better about yourself. Doesn't really matter if it is color, creed, or learned behavior. We go to war to self-enforce those beliefs. That is why War always boils down to us vs them.
We use mind altering substances(alcohol is included) to alter our perceived reality to the point where we can accept ourselves.
Most people can't accept grey, or accept responsibility for their own actions. They can't work with people in peace.
I know from personal experience that there are some people I just can't stand. It isn't they are bad people, or I resent them, but simply our personalities clash in a way that is difficult to tell why we argue when we both agree.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The emperor has risen. (And I don't just mean this one example - the Executive has been ignoring congress a lot lately.)
If Obama could ignore Congress, he would have:
-closed Guantanimo (closure blocked by "bipartisan"--but mostly Republican--majority in House and Senate removing funding for any transfer, as well as forbidding the transfer to anywhere inside the US)
-passed a stimulus bill that actually invested the majority of its money into job creation, rather than half into tax breaks for the rich (a "compromise" made with Republicans to keep them from stonewalling more than they already did)
-given us a public healcare option (blocked by thirty-nine Republicans plus Joe Frickin' Lieberman whose state houses the headquarters of most major health insurance companies)
-written a banking reform law with teeth (again, rendered toothless by forty Republicans)
Politically, our biggest problem is that we have a two-party system, where one party is totally, openly evil and corrupt, and the other is slightly less evil and corrupt, but their non-evil tendencies are easily blocked because the evil one thinks nothing of playing chicken with the budget, the government, even the entire economy in order to get what they want, which is apparently more cash giveaways for their rich campaign donors.
I see you are ignorant of the art of traffic analysis and intelligence analysis. Each little piece of data posted to FB is useless, in itself. All of it together, in toto, is tremendously valuable. Who knows whom and who communicates with whom, regardless of what they actually say, is probably the most important part. Who does NOT communicate with whom, and what is NOT said, is nearly as important.
For example, let's say that the US gets some rabble rouser similar to Martin Luther King or Jesus, one who has not yet been assassinated. Let's say the FBI implements their standard 'Dirty Tricks' campaign, like they did against Dr. King (see History 101) and surely would against Jesus. One thing they would alost certainly do is monitor and harass her supporters. Local leaders would be tagged for special attention, up to and including violence, arrest, and extraordinary rendition. Facebook is the PERFECT tool to track down who is a supporter, and who is not. The fact that YOU, personally, are not a supporter, and that your FB profile shows that, makes it that much easier to track down her actual supporters. Also, don't think you could fool the data mining system: a person with leadership potential can be easily identified as such from the pattern of FB use surrounding their account; if many of your friends are identified as supporting a certain subversive idea (e.g. freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, freedom from arbitrary search and seizure, opposition to torture, et cetera), then you will automatically be tagged as probably also supporting that subversive idea. If YOU are careful never to support a subversive idea, and never befriend anyone who does, you still make it easier to find those who do, by eliminating yourself as a suspect.
I suggest you read George Orwell's 1984, and consider what the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love would do with Facebook. Then look around at your country and your government, and see whether it bears any resemblance to the institutions described by Mr. Orwell. Start paying attention & be honest.
I wish to second the 'Ghost Profile' concept mentioned above by another poster. It's probably already done. This has the clever effect of using citizens who are still foolish enough to use FB to act as informants against those people who have realized that FB, as it currently exists, is a very bad idea.
This author could provide a stunning and revelatory (to the Slashdot crowd) example of just what can be done through the clever use of a digital profile, and how this is connected to Julian Assange. This author chooses not to do so, at this time.
In the US this case would be laughed out of court.
You're talking non-sense. Judge Judy would have taken this case very seriously.
Since Facebook users volunteer up the information that pretty much makes it public information.
Okay, so if I post information on Facebook (either editing my profile or posting a status) then I am voluntarily giving that information to Facebook, so that makes it public information? Even though I expect only people I have marked as friends to see such information by my privacy settings? What if I send a Facebook message? It has a clear "To" header like an e-mail; should that information be considered public? For that matter what about GMail? I am inputting information into a textbox on a website with the intent that (specific) other people will read that text. Should I therefore treat that text as public knowledge? For a physical analogue, suppose I write my text on paper (perhaps multiple copies) and put those pieces of paper into envelopes and send them to my friends via snail mail. I, once again, have written text and tendered it to a third-party for delivery to a specific set of private individuals. Should I still expect this text to be public?
The United States has laws about privacy and due process. New technology should not make it so the government no longer has to follow due process in collecting private information on its citizens. Unfortunately, due to the nature of network effects, a lot of information gets concentrated in the hands of a few entities (in this case, Facebook) who do not necessarily have much interest in dealing with the government, so they simply freely hand over the information. I suppose privacy laws could be written to make it illegal for Facebook to hand over information about its users to the government, but it is not clear what such laws would even look like nor who would be supporting them.
Seriously, I don't care if you know that I'm at the book store buying a coffee. If I don't want this information to be public I don't post it. Problem solved.
You are right that a lot of this information actually is not that important. At the same time, I do not like the idea that law enforcement personnel can peer into my private life as recorded by various services I use without even having to justify the invasion of my privacy to a judge.
Of course, see my sig: I dislike the idea of monolithic services that are able to collect such information and would prefer that social networking (and other) services be made up of collections of smaller separately administered nodes, each of which would have far less information. How to do that while still having a usable service is, unfortunately, an open problem.
Centralization breaks the internet.
The social graph is a very interesting thing to police and intelligence agencies. Just knowing who knows who can be very useful. That said, there are lots of dead-ends and rabbit trails on the social graphs....but it is a great place to start.
I don't care what the faceless "agencies" know about me because I have nothing to hide from them
I do. I have a lot to hide from them.
I want to hide the stuff from them that's NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS.
If a Government makes it law for any entity that has data to to share it with them on request, that's spying. If they incentivize companies, with payments, thats spying.
With Wikileaks, they decide what should be released about a company/government/etc and that person has no say in it. With Facebook, the individual decides what gets released. Anything you don't give to them, anything you don't post, doesn't get released. You don't want your phone number released? Don't give it to them. They don't go hoovering that kind of stuff up.
The problem with FB seems to come from people's false assumption that their weak ass privacy controls mean anything. No, not so much. Basically, you need to assume anything you post anywhere on the web is public, and that goes double for social networking sites. So, don't post it to FB if you don't want the world to see it. Real simple.
I have a FB profile, because there are things I'm ok with everyone knowing. All of it, with the possible exception of photos of me, is more or less public record anyhow. However there's not a lot on there. Many of their fields remain blank. That is because it is stuff I don't care to be public. I choose what to release and I don't really care where it goes, because I presume by posting it there I made it public to all.
I'm surprised no other people are talking about this aspect of Assange's remarks. Having a graph of the connections between (almost) everyone allows you a great level of control over how rumours and ideas spread in that graph, and as a result allows shady government agencies to socially engineer the public more effectively. I bet somebody somewhere must already have a computer model with all the connections in FB and is using basic epidemiology-style graph theory to calculate how to most effectively mind-control the dumb unwashed.
For instance, if they want to indirectly influence some official in a certain country, they could try influencing the friends of his son, who will in turn influence the son, who will then exert pressure on the official. Or, if they want to influence the largest number of people possible, they work to influence the people with the most connections. You get the idea - except on a much larger scale (think six degrees of separation).
I also have to wonder how HBGary's fake online persona "clone army" is related to this sort of thing.
it should also be noted that there's a line "Follow us on Facebook" on this site...
http://www.wikileaks.ch/gitmo/
Which leads to here:
http://www.facebook.com/wikileaks
I've made it a point to avoid Facebook over the years for a lot of reasons. Chiefly because of privacy concerns. I've recently found myself single, and with a pretty lacking social network. With Facebook being *the* place to build these networks, I've had to reconsider the downside to whoring out my personal data. Perhaps the question should not be how we keep the data out of the hands of government and advertisers, but how to adjust to an age (and adjust a government) where nothing is personal.
Assange comes from far too privileged of a life.
The "most appalling spy machines" I can think of are the North Korean/Soviet/Chinese/Ba'ath/Iranian surveillance systems, where they don't even have notions such as warrants and due process and right to reasonable privacy. Assange needs to read about some true issues in the world. We still have hundreds of thousands of North Koreans in physical labor reeducation centers, Chinese sending hundreds of citizens at a time to secret prisons, Syrian Ba'ath surveillance where a government informer is installed in every individual neighborhood, pervasive Iranian political police cracking down on dissidents... Come on now, there are far worse monstrosities in the world today than Facebook telling the world on accident that you cheat on your significant other or do drugs. Some people need to get a grip.
The fun part is you LIE about what others think. I have yet to encounter 1 person in real life who thinks Assanges a criminal. Care to share which laws he has broken>? of wait of course you cant.
"What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? Lets take a look.
I give you private information on corporations for free, and I'm a villian. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money, and he's man of the year.
Thanks to wikileaks, you can see how corrupt governments operate in the shadows, and then lie to those who elect them. Thanks to facebook, you can finally figure out which Sex and the City character you are."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9LqnowYVQE
CAPS LOCK IS THE CRUISE CONTROL OF AWESOMNESS
The extra funny thing is that 1) Its voluntary, and 2) most people on facebook aren't thinking of themselves as criminals with things to hide.
People VOLUNTARILY share this information. Sure its a society where privacy can be beneficial, but this *society* is actually very social. People are driven to share their lives with each other, and while many a smirk is made by joking about the uselessness of facebook, the truth is we are drawn towards it like a magnet of interest! The truth is, the people on facebook aren't afraid of being called a 'criminal' because they probably don't consider themselves as such.
Now there might even be criminals using facebook to their own demise... Who knows... But unlike Assanage, most of us are living our lives without fear of some repercussion. And as we desire, we socialize.
Once Corporations and Government become the same thing -- maybe its too late to undo anything and we'll all get our tattoos and serial numbers... I just used the last of my tinfoil on a nice dinner, so... well... so much for worrying about being made out 'bad', lol.
If I was a terrorist the first thing I would do is stop all my online activity and change my identity or more likely I never would have had a FB account at all. It's trivial to have your public persona look nice and normal and do all your illegal, secret, subversive communications done in ways that are impossible to track or intercept. Terrorists have a lot to fear from government intelligence agencies, but FB is not one of them.
What the government CAN use FB for is to spy on and pacify its own citizens. Say a radical politician that the government doesn't like is getting too popular, you can use his followers info on FB to intimidate them or dig up dirt to discredit their cause. Things like that.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Ask yourself - does he call himself a major hacker or is that what lazy journalists are doing?
Also this stuff is obvious to you and me but apparently not to all the morons on facebook that post incriminating items under their real name and where prospective employers can see them. It's not a bad thing to say if a microphone is shoved in your face by a journalist that really wants something about a very mundane sex "scandal" instead.
> Seriously (not trolling, I'm really asking), why would you expect that, if you're smuggling stuff, or have a few grams of cocaine on you, you can walk freely all over the country? I mean if the thing is illegal to do, posses, traffic or whatever, why do you expect that you can get away with it? Are you expecting the judge to believe you had a "reasonable expectation" that you weren't going to be arrested?
Our Constitution grants us the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Originally it was meant to prevent the central government from having too much power. (May also have been one of grievances against the King we were rebelling against. We sent a list, and some of those wound up as things we promised our federal government would not do.) After our civil war, we amended the Constitution to say that people have a right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law." Fast forward about a hundred years, and cops in the south were violating civil rights of black people in the south left, right, and center. In 1969, the Supreme Court decided that was not okay. But rather than formally making it about civil rights of black people, or about racist cops, it interpreted "due process of law" to include a guaranty against unreasonable search and seizure, like the guaranty in the Fourth Amendment.
So then cops were Constitutionally required not to search unreasonably. What happens when they do? Two things: (1) You can sue the gov. in a 1983 action. Most of these are spurious suits brought by prisoners, but we accept those as the cost of ensuring legitimate grievances are heard. (2) They cannot use the information against you in court. This means cops have a much bigger interest in respecting the right not to be unreasonably searched, since if they do and they find something, you will walk free.
The right expanded during the civil rights era and has been constricting since then, because it is always unpopular to have a rule that lets criminals walk scott-free, so the Supreme Court has been chipping away at it.
What you have, when you are walking down the street, is a reasonable expectation that a cop isn't going to stop you at random and check all your pockets for cocaine. But not always--there are different rules at the border, at places that are the functional equivalent of the border, etc...
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Go check out OpenBook, way too many people do (ew!)
Unfortunately Congress is about as powerless today, as the Roman Senate was under the caesars.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!
Oh man, that's a good one. That must be why Congress is actively ramming technical rocket designs down NASA's (read, top world organization of rocket scientists) throat with little to no regard about what actual engineers and scientists have to say about the design. That must be why Congress has been bobbling around various bits and pieces of corrupt corporation backing copyright legislation (what's it called this time around, COICA?). That must be why Congress cast the deciding vote on whether or not we (the U.S.) should go to war in Iraq. Best yet, that must be why Congress recently voted on the extension of the "Fuck Your Civil Liberties," errrr, I mean "PATRIOT Act" recently.
Yup, those poor powerless Congress-critters, whatever will they do?
Don't fucking kid yourself. Congress isn't powerless. It's simply a bought and sold organization that whores itself out to the highest bidder. You're right in one thing, Congressional members don't represent shit-all of their constituencies interests. But Congress is far from powerless. It's simply another tumor killing the country that the United States of America could have been in the 21st century.
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That's a very common misconception: privacy is not about criminals with things to hide.
It's about not giving some centralized entity an enormous power because they know everything about everyone. Such a huge power will be misused, sooner or later.
That's why you still need privacy and secrecy even (especially!) if you've nothing to hide. And, BTW, everyone has something to hide to at least someone else.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Both parties are similarly corrupt, and that's a fact. Saying that one party is less evil than the other one is pretty much stupid on your part. It is really easy to point out crazy things that politicians from each party does. Very easy.
Instances are not trends. Yes, it's true that the Democrats share a few of the Republicans' failings:, in particular an over-willingness to kowtow to the whims of the media/telcomm lobby (an unfortunate necessity in today's world, where so few media companies control so much of public opinion), which leads to their unfortunate shared support for strengthening imaginary property laws. They also have the unique failing of being especially enamored of the trial lawyer lobby, and thus aren't really looking that hard at frivolous lawsuits and litigation trolls. On the other hand, the Republican Party is at this point completely taken over by megacorporate interests, to the point that they no longer even consider the impact of their policies on any other group.
You don't have to look back any further than last December to see that the only Republican principle that they really care about is to give away money to wealthy campaign donors, and to take money away from any program that is not a giveaway to those donors. These Tea Party activists may have genuinely bought into the media campaign that Republicans have used for decades to get elected, but that's almost more frightening; the only thing more destructive to the country than what the Republicans are actually doing are the things that they *say* they're going to do, backed by the fanaticism of true believers.
Don't worry, I'm sure sure they can make up one. After all, our Swedish prosecutors managed to put out an arrest warrant for rape because he allegedly broke the condom when having consensual sex...
I'm always shocked when I see the "There's much worse places in the world, so what we do is alright" argument.
Let me put thing this way:
- If any democratic country needs to be put side-by-side with the worse countries in the world to look good, then it's a failure.
Beyond that, there's also the issue of direction - as in, "What is the direction things are taking?" - which seems to be quietly ignored by the apologists of "We're better than North Korea" style of argument.
Given that in the US (and also, to an extent, in most Western Democracies) things are getting worse when it comes to respect for people's rights while, for example, in North Korea they're not (in fact, they can only get better over there), then the US looks worse (going down) than North Korea (not going anywhere).
If you want to be a real patriot, I suggest you look at the road ahead and try and get the driver to avoid driving you down a deep canyon rather than spending your time looking at the car seats and comenting on how wonderful it all is.
Come on now, there are far worse monstrosities in the world today than Facebook telling the world on accident that you cheat on your significant other or do drugs.
Just because there are worse monstrosities doesn't mean we have to accept all the lesser monstrosities.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
I have yet to encounter 1 person in real life who thinks Assanges a criminal
Go to any mainstream new site. Find a story about Wikileaks. Go to the comments section. Then return to your real life and be very glad that you don't have to interact with those people on a daily basis. Then remember that their votes each count as much as yours...
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The women weren't even sure themselves they had been raped. They went to the police to "consult", not to file a report, and the prosecutor decided to warrant an arrest based on their story. Incidentally, the prosecutor happened to know one of the women since before.
The arrest warrant was subsequently thrown out by a second prosecutor, and then reinstated by a third.
Also note that the women admit the sex was consensual. One of them accuses Assange of breaking the condom during consensual sex, and the other one accuses Assange of molesting her while she was sleeping in the same bed as him after the consensual sex.
And, yes, even Swedish lawyers think the allegations are ridiculous.
One of the confirming factors of the hiding place of a certain recently deceased was that the compound had no telephone and no internet. Do you think in the future if you tried to live 'off the net' by not having a facebook account, twitter, gmail and whatever else, you might come under more scrutiny by DHS, FBI and so on?
I already get strange looks if I pay cash for anything over a ten in the shops (but then this is the UK, competing for the title of the most-surveilled population on the planet)
The obvious answer here is that you have not given it enough thought. You have not actively participated in discussions with real people who hold different views and been open to listening to those views. Here is one simple word that answers a lot of what you claim you don't understand: POWER.
Here is a simple way of describing it that involves a huge amount of nuance and complexity behind the scenes -- those who have it want to keep it; those who don't have it, want it. Now, think about what it takes to get that power and how many palms you have to grease along the way. You will be owned by those interests in the future -- how will you pay them back?
Blaming the media is a stupid, currently favored bogeyman approach to keeping one's eyes closed. If you don't trust an "independent" (yes, there are lots of issues with that word) third party, then who are you supposed to trust? Give me another entity that can delve into every facet of government, business and personal life and disseminate knowledge to the entire population? Many countries have carved out specific protections for the media to be able to do this and have given the media unprecedented access just so a semblance of "truth" (ouch, another problematic word) can get out.
Why do you suppose religion exists? Why would people willingly submit themselves to the authority of a small, privileged group (or individual) and then take the word of this group, or person, as (pun intended) gospel? Why don't they ask questions? Why don't they confront their leaders?
One key thing to remember is that the majority of the World's population is too busy trying to survive to be worried about politics, or why wars are started. They are manipulated by the information brokers into believing the cause is just and they don't have time to adjust their lives to accommodate fact-checking the allegations. Those who do have the time are wealthy (relatively speaking) and they aspire to be power/information brokers themselves, even if only in small ways.
At a basic level, we are all the same. We identify with our peers and our community. Our "truth" is built around the place we were born and where we grew up -- even today. It is easy to manipulate us because we are human, not fact-checking, emotionless computers. Wars start because, just like on the playground, you hurt (kill) my friends and I am now going to hurt (kill) you back. That's what the power and information brokers have been pushing to the people for as long as human societies have existed. We just have really, really, sophisticated ways of doing this now.
It isn't a bad guy vs good guy thing, it's a belief/faith thing. You have a faith that you may not even understand in your own society (Western). It is easy for you to believe what you are told by *your* leaders. Now, for a moment, why don't you try to believe everything said by some other authority -- say, the Chinese. Let's see how far you get. But, if *you* were Chinese, you would have an amazing faith in those leaders -- even if you did not like the Chinese form of government. Making Americans look evil is easy, if you are not American.
Keep thinking about it. Maybe you'll get there one day.