Slashdot Mirror
Snowden and the Fate of the Internet As a Global Network
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "John Naughton writes in the Guardian that the insight that seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media regarding the revelations from Edward Snowden is how the US has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data proving that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. 'The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system,' writes Naughton. 'Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA.' This spells the end of the internet as a truly global network. 'It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.' Naughton adds that given what we now know about how the US has been abusing its privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable. 'Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes?' writes Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission. 'Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally, and providers will miss out on a great opportunity.'"
Something to actually use.
*As long as that speech falls into the category of things that benefits the U.S. government.
There is no need for the ACLU and EFF to ride to the rescue. Goldman Sachs, Koch Industries and the aother malefactors of great wealth will soon curb the excesses of the NSA. No powerful corporation will tolerate the routine interception of its business communications and the reading of its internal records by a political entity. Of course, this remedial action will be clothed in the dignified garb of defense of civil liberties, but in the end, it will amount to a restoration of a balance of power.
America first! Power to the people!
-- Ethanol-fueled
It does not spell the end of a global network, just like spam did not end the popularity of e-mail. More programs that are capable of storing things in the cloud will feature encryption from now on, and more people will use it.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
We humans seems to have such high aspirations. Yet, we let the few greedy and power hungry among us take all the wealth and power and return the favor with a boot the collective head of rest.
Don't forget to return HTML/WWW to CERN first. Then you can talk about 'very little outside help'.
it was always a series of government and privately owned networks, interconnected together for some limited communication and a common naming/addressing scheme for communication
It's always been the elephant in the room. The only new thing is that it has become obvious to a larger number of people that encryption isn't just an "in case" precaution. Anyone who knows anything about the way the Internet works has been aware for years that nothing is secure unless you both encrypt it and control the only means to decrypt it (either by encrypting it to someone's public key whom you trust or by encrypting it for your own secure decryption later).
So again, the only real change is that the tinfoil hats were verifiably right for once. The question nobody seems to be answering is, what (other than nothing) will the general public do about it? The answer to that is, only as much as they are forced to.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
And we Brits want our Turing Machines back!
I don't remember the US paying for all the network infrastructure in my country.
The US invented aviation too, but that doesn't allow us to collect rent on every aircraft flight, or to go through the pockets of every passenger.
Is there really anything worthwhile on the non-Western Internet, at least from the perspective of most Westerners?
I know I couldn't care any less if I could no longer access Russian or Chinese websites, for instance. Due to language differences, they're already pretty much useless to me. I know this also holds true for most Americans and Australians, and many Europeans, too.
Yeah, I know, there are probably a small number of expats and academics who find some use in such information, but there aren't many of them. Aside from them, I don't think that Westerners in general would really miss those very foreign parts of the Internet if they suddenly disappeared.
Try storing an encrypted container. When you want to access it, download it, decrypt it locally, do your work, reencrypt, and reupload. Unless your home PC is keylogged, you're safe. But if your PC is keylogged, whether you use cloud services is irrelevant.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Hahahahahahahahahahaha.
O, you're serious : (.
Chauvinism and blind nationalism for the win!
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
The internet is a network of autonomous systems. You built your part of the network, we built ours. If the autonomous systems agree to use a different root DNS service and a different number registry, then that's what's going to happen. Seeing how the US has proven itself to be untrustworthy, it will happen.
Suppose your philosopher king came to you and said, "We want to set up our own national network with privacy/neutrality as the core principle, away from the prying eyes of our tyrannical neighbours".
What would you do differently? Can much of the problem be engineered out, at least at the network layer?
Is it just end-to-end encryption? Or anonymised routing? What's the collection of technolgies you'd use to make things at least better?
if the internet fragments (balkanisation). The US Governments endless desire to control all the data out there is IMHO fatally flawed but will drive anyone with anything to hide deep underground (if they are not already there)
The revelations about the activities of the NSA, GCHQ etc should be a wake-up call both for governments and people all over the world. If you don't want the spooks to read your data, don't send it over the internet even if you encrypt it. IMHO anything that is encrypted will be a clear flag to the spooks that something nefarious is going on even if it isn't. Using HTTPS is no longer safe. etc etc
The spooks are determined to make inroads into everyone's privacy no matter where you are in the world and they don't seem to care who they step on to do it.
Yeah and us Brits invented the computer AND the web too. And we want it back from you dickheads, clearly our errant colonial children are not yet mature enough to be trusted with custodianship of this technology.
I don't know why this is a surprise to anyone out there. The internet was never a secure place to store any information, or discuss anything. Putting something in "the cloud" is like putting on your front porch. When is the general public going to realize this? Google is giving you email for free, do you really think no one is reading it?
A member of my family has expressed the following concern: If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, what's wrong with the United States Government knowing the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?
There, what else seems to be the problem?
If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, then why does the United States Government need to know the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?
Alonzo Church was an American. Had there been no Turing, computers as we know them might have been designed through analogy to the lambda calculus rather than to the finite state machine with tape.
The Internet is a "stone soup". It was a DoD effort at first, but the world has put in a lot of technologies in general.
If I were to state who "owns" the Internet now, I would probably say China, since they are the top producer of L1 gear (switches, routers, NICs, motherboard chips, etc.,) and without that layer, everything else isn't going to happen.)
Australia wants its WIFI back too!
The "news" here is that the U.S. is better positioned to apply leverage to get the information and access it wants than other governments are. It also has a stronger military and a greater influence over international financial institutions. It's good to be king. Thankfully Putin and the Chinese Communist Party do not have the same reach, but they certainly do their best with what reach they can muster. Most of the posturing by EU officials is hypocritical. They directly benefit from the U.S.'s position and protection. That's why so many secretly cooperate.
The point is that if you put information or valuables where somebody else can get it, assume someone will. There is no permanently "safe" place for your information. There never has been. Why does anyone expect that there is?
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Nobody is forgetting that. It is just deemed to be irrelevant. Just like the fact that the Nazi's developed the rocket tech used by the US to fly to the moon. It did not stop the US from doing it. Why would this be different ?
That's not a concern. That's just a paraphrase of "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide."
If one is still asking that question at this point, when it has been answered a hundred ways on a hundred days, then he doesn't care about any answer, and will continue to dismiss it.
Oh come on...
clearly our errant colonial children are not yet mature enough to be trusted with custodianship of this technology.
I agree the Americans may have done some questionable stuff, but I think you're conveniently forgetting who their bedfellows were in the whole affair, and especially the "Oh, your laws don't let you run surveillance on your own citizens? Let us do that for you then, and we'll give you the info later."
The US invented aviation too, but that doesn't allow us to collect rent on every aircraft flight, or to go through the pockets of every passenger.
Richard Pearse would like to have a word with you.
IMHO, the author's conclusion is a bit overly dramatic. I think a more realistic conclusion is a gradual fade out of cloud computing and cloud storage. Business and people will be more inclined to keep their private data on local, closed systems now because they no longer trust the government not to stick their nose in where it doesn't belong. How long will it be before the same effect happens to socialized medicine? Would you trust the government not to use your medical status against you?
The US has repeatedly argued to retain control of critical internet infrastructure (e.g. ICANN) on the basis that it can and should be trusted to uphold the freedom and neutrality of the network and allow unfettered global use of it.
Can't hear your privacy concerns over the sound of lolcat images in their mail inbox/youtube.
I've got nothing to hide, so there is no reason to look. Should work both ways.
What is not illegal now might become illegal in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_Nazi_Germany_and_the_Holocaust
... is that, either literally or metaphorically, it's vulnerable to someone holding a gun to your head and demanding the key. We're seeing this (the literal version) in the USA already. I agree with the thesis of the original article: The farther you can keep your data from USA-entangled entity, the better.
Does John Naughton (or anyone else) believe that ANY OTHER sovereign state on the planet would allow Internet operators within their boarders to go unmonitored? Where should we turn? Russia? China? The Netherlands?
This is why:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Long story short? Unless the government has demonstrable cause to read/know the full text of "everything", it's none of their fucking business.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Substitute government with your neighbor. Does that clear things up?
In particular, government, being comprised of mere human beings, should (logically) not be trusted with any more power than the average human being.
Most people won't really care/comprehend much past the drama generated around the whole thing. In the US, Reality TV wins, everything else is lucky if it gets a confused, apathetic nod. If it's more work than walking to the checkout line at a Walmart, people just won't do it.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
It's not hard to imagine why the EU would want to limit access to it's network. It's not China or Russia only.
I'm ignoring the rest of your comment on how WEST IS THE BEST.
Few MMOs maybe, some professional gaming streams, manga and movies of giant monsters fighting robots, endless ads and other marketing nonsense, and lots of carefully tweaked propaganda disguised as news. So it's pretty much on par with the Western internet.
UNLIMITED Domain Hosting, UNLIMITED GB Hosting Space, UNLIMITED GB File Transfer, UNLIMITED Email Accounts, FREE Domain, FREE Site Builder ..
vs the ~10 Gb bandwidth, 2 Gb Disk space other parts of the world offer at the low end.
The mid and high end will start to think about air gap, no cloud, encryption and trusted local staff.
The real fun is in bilateral agreements, trade deals and telcos just helping so the paperwork is signed.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/07/12/telstras-deal-with-the-devil-fbi-access-to-its-undersea-cables/
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/02/telecoms-bt-vodafone-cables-gchq
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Charles Babbage invented the computer, not your fairy scucide friend.
A member of my family has expressed the following concern: If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, what's wrong with the United States Government knowing the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?
They haven't been keeping up with current events, have they.
Have them google (if they know how), "IRS abuses".
You see, when the typical person on average commits 3 crimes per day, the State now has an unlimited supply of criminals - EVERYONE.
Mix it in with a For Profit prison system, politicians with agendas, and the increasing polarization of politics in the US, you WILL see abuses that we would have never thought could happen in the US.
EVERYONE has something to hide!
My congressional rep is a pretty far right "We gotta stop the terr'rists" type. I've been trying to figure out the message that will ring with him, to help him understand what we have at stake here. I think it is this: Surveillance cannot become a condition of purchasing American goods and services, or we will lose business. And the solution is already in use in New Jersey:
"Under settled New Jersey law, individuals do not lose their right to privacy simply because they have to give information to a third-party provider, like a phone company or bank, to get service."
I don't want to play to stereotypes, but the reality is that New Jersey is host to some of the traditionally hard-to-crack criminal enterprises. Yet they have decided that the ability to do business must not take a back seat to making law enforcement a little easier. We cannot let surveillance become a condition of purchasing American goods and services.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
oh, and germany is now demanding that every car in the world has a german blackbox in it (that can be read anytime by the german bundesnachrichtendienst). since they invented the car, they should have a right to see what it is used for, right?
That's not the internet, although it may seem like it these days. I was sending and receiving email and files over the internet in the early 1980s, long before the WooWooWoo. In fact the WWW was really a logical extension of the NeXTStep OS with its object-based system, which allowed NeXTMail and, really, any document, to incorporate objects of any type - audio and video in email, or in a spreadsheet.
In 1990 I was product manager for PaperSight, a networked document management system that allowed annotation and attachment of any object to scanned documents for the paperless office, which ran on the NeXT. It was more capable than any web-based system I've seen yet, for that application. You could circle a word or paragraph and add an annotation, for example. The NeXT was the only machine+OS at the time that could handle the capabilities well.
HTML's primary advance was using a subset of SGML to codify the construction of such documents, instead of requiring 'real programming' to support it. I used to have a copy of the WorldWideWeb program written by TBL on my NeXT machine, and it was actually not at that time as capable as many other programs on the NeXT. Of course that was early days. TBL was always quite upfront about how he was inspired by the NeXT.
The other major 'innovation' if you can call it that, was Al Gore's sponsorship of legislation opening up the Internet to non-defense and non-research institutions. Then there was DNS, by Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris, which came out in 1983 - eight or nine years before the WWW.
Even today, IIRC email remains the majority of internet traffic, dwarfing WWW.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
It's still a global network, and will continue to be a global network even if it's balkanized. Your business network is part of "the Internet" even though it's protected by a firewall. You might use different servers and services, but it's still all connected.
The Internet has never been so uniform a thing as what this summary implies. Different countries have been filtering access, providing different services, etc. Even in cases where access is unfettered, there are still language barriers, cultural barriers, an geographic barriers. I don't access Russian sites and services very much because I don't speak Russian, I don't live in Russia, and I'm not Russian. But we can still access many of the same sites, and we can still send email to each other.
I'm still surprised this is such big news when the AT&T scandal got little national interest.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Which is propably the case. My biggest fear is that instead of curbing those crooks it will make them doind the same crap overtly. And overtly opressing everyone opposing them. Some crooks have already become proud, overt pricks (eg. Holder saying he won't prosecute big banks and on the other hand praising Aaron Schwarts treatment).
Give me but six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find something in them to have him hanged."
The mainstream media may not be playing this up, but I'm sure it's being heard in governments, corporate boardrooms, and consumer-advocate organizations world-wide.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Is there really anything worthwhile on the non-Western Internet, at least from the perspective of most Westerners?
I know I couldn't care any less if I could no longer access Russian or Chinese websites, for instance. Due to language differences, they're already pretty much useless to me. I know this also holds true for most Americans and Australians, and many Europeans, too.
Yeah, I know, there are probably a small number of expats and academics who find some use in such information, but there aren't many of them. Aside from them, I don't think that Westerners in general would really miss those very foreign parts of the Internet if they suddenly disappeared.
Would you care if you could no longer send email to those countries? What about parts of Europe? What about India? India, China, and Asia represent something like 40% of the Human race... that's a huge portion of potential customers that now have a catastrophically negative image of storing their data in our country on our servers.
We've really screwed ourselves here.
Who did what now?
And thus we see how the value of the remote "cloud" as the solution to all things starts to diminish. In computers (as with many other things - education, government, manufacturing, employment ,...) there is a wave pattern between key trends, an ongoing shift between local versus remote infrastructure. Like so many other technologies that have experienced the hype of being "the future", I have little doubt that over time the externally hosted cloud, and the type of infrastructure solutions that it offers, will find an appropriate place like so many before it. Concerns about privacy rights, ownership and access are going to push a large number of organizations back to hosting their own solutions locally, the cost of doing so being mediated by the value of better control over their information and content. It was always an inevitability, just a matter of the right circumstances driving the shift.
If you don't want the NSA to look at your data, build your own damn internet.
How can you ignore a part of the comment that isn't even there? No part of it makes an absolute comparison between the value of Western and non-Western culture. It merely points out that, due to very real and prevalent linguistic differences, a lot of non-Western content is of very limited use to most Westerners. This holds true in the opposite direction, too, I do hope you realize!
Ask your family member if they would like their neighbours to see every single thing they read and write on the Internet. If they don't like that, then why would they allow their government to see everything, knowing that a government (and its individual civil servants) can do far more damage, intentionally or by accident, than any neighbour could with that information.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
No, we didn't invent the airplane. Or Autos. Or contact lenses. Or high speed highways. Or stealth technology. Or batteries. Or... the list goes on. It's true we perfected (or helped perfect) a lot, but as far as inventing them... not really as much as one would think.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
There is nothing new here.
Remember the origins of Red Star Linux.
http://www.nwo.net/osall/News/Old_News/NSA_Backdoor_/nsa_backdoor_.html
As long as China keeps getting the full source for Microsoft products, why should they care?
if we lost ability to email china and india, think of the jobs that would have to come back home again!
the silver lining, in a way.
perhaps mistrust of other nations (and vice versa) would be good for us.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Von Neumann was born in Hungary; he moved to the US in 1933. Einstein was a German; he moved to the US only in 1933, decades after he published his famous relativity theory in the 1910s. Now, if we were to follow your logic and only those countries where technology x was invented can use this technology, then the US would still be a well.... hunter-gatherer society. You can attribute many 20th century inventions to US citizens, but they tend to build on earlier industrial revolution technology. And where did that happen? Right, in Europe. Now, take your nationalistic bullshit, and put it up your ass. Technology is for all of mankind.
A member of my family has expressed the following concern: If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, what's wrong with the United States Government knowing the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?
Because there are so many laws that one cannot categorically conclude that one is not committing a crime. Because quotes or actions taken out of context can be made to sound or seem suspicious. Because these surveillance abilities are used to intimidate political activists trying to change the status quo. Because innocent people are sometimes mistakenly charged with and convicted of crimes they did not commit.
It's not the sites it's the people.
Log into your favourtie forum and discover most of the people you know aren't American.
Also understand that the coming balkanisation may include other Non-American Western countries equally fed up with American attitudes to right and wrong.
The first thing I do at every company is to restrict access to US-only webapps to US-only IPs.
Makes my weblogs much cleaner.
American companies care. How are they going to buy all that cheap stuff from China and sell it to you if they can't access Chinese' web sites? How will Apple email the guys at the Foxconn factory?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is why:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Long story short? Unless the government has demonstrable cause to read/know the full text of "everything", it's none of their fucking business.
Government's trump card: National Security Letter
The Government declared the Constitution of the United States of America as a "worthless piece of paper".
I predict that some countries will agree to route all traffic - or at least all traffic that appears to e encrypted, i.e. https, ssh, etc. - through VPNs or similar tunnels that use directly-exchanged, self-signed public keys, ensuring that no "intermediate country" will be able to snoop or at least making it extremely expensive for them to do so.
Yes, this will increase cost, and yes, this will mean some intermediate countries will refuse to carry such traffic forcing the traffic through longer, slower, or more expensive routes, but it will allow participating countries to tell their citizens "your data won't be intercepted except in the sending and receiving countries."
Such a guarantee may also be a relatively cheap way of complying with existing data-privacy laws.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The people in the parts of Europe worth emailing won't disconnect themselves from the Western Internet. In general, nobody in the West would care if they couldn't email Bulgaria or Belarus any longer, for example. It's not something that happens much in the first place.
And while India and China may have a large number of people, there's really no need for Westerners to have any contact with the huge majority of those people who live in urban slums, or those who live isolated rural lifestyles, especially when they lack even the most basic levels of education and have absolutely no understanding of English, French, German, Spanish or any other major Western language.
Even when communication does happen, especially with Indians, many Westerners don't really want it to happen. If email to and from India were restricted or even eliminated, I know that there would be many Westerners happy that they no longer have to deal with half-assed tech support or outsourcing firms based there.
What is a Westerner? In, say, Italy 6.5 % of the population was born abroad. It is only an official figure.
An if there is no connection to Runet, than no more news on Snowden, on Pussy Riot, on launching US astronauts from Baikonur, etc.
Welcome to the new brave globalized World!
The reason that the fourth amendment (by any sane reading) prohibits the government from doing this sort of thing is to prevent a range of attacks on the people (especially those in public office). Suppose for instance, that government agency A dislikes Congressperson Smith, because Rep. Smith wants to defund agency A. If agency A can read all of his correspondence, agency A is in the position to blackmail Rep. Smith. In fact, it doesn't matter if Rep. Smith has done anything that his constituents would object to if agency A is known to read all of everyone's correspondence, as they can just say that he had a "hidden" account where he performed all his incriminating correspondence.
The step of replacing "agency A" with "NSA" and "Rep Smith" with "approximately half of congress" is left to the reader.
(All phrases from the summary or the Guardian story.) The Guardian story itself isn't really wrong, but it does fall on its face when it says things like that. The above statements are extremely wrong, and nobody is going to be able to handle and correctly react to what they're learning, until they understand how backwards that is.
All this is the end of, is the brief delusion that some people started to have(*), where they trusted services provided by completely unaccountable entities. This includes hosting services, person-to-person intermediate communication services, and key introducers. If you stop using (or stop relying upon) these things which are incapable of serving you with absolute priority over all other concerns, then you really have very few worries. Just two of them, really:
1) Pretty much the only serious technical worry, is that you might not be able to trust endpoints to really be running the software that you think it's running; i.e. there's a reasonable chance "they" already pwn your phone, a possibility there's some funny business in Intel vpro, fears of a Vingean "Secure Hardware Environment" -- that kind of stuff.
2) And then there's the non-technical worry: that the people you know, who haven't caught up yet, may never discard the delusion and adjust to reality and start using the Internet correctly (i.e. you can't key-exchange with them, because they don't know what that means and refuse to learn and do it). These people are going to continue using leaky services, so anything you share with them, will be leaked.
That's it. If you can address those two things, either by preventing them or containing them, then the Internet is still you fr-- still very useful, since you should already have been using in a manner where you enjoy the packets being delivered but never trust what they say until you have verified them. There is so much we can do, if we Make the Internet ours. And the first step toward doing that, is to recognize that it's a hostile IO device through which to tunnel, and that if you don't know whom you're talking to, then you really don't know whom you're talking to.
(*) I say it's a delusion we started to have, because seriously, if you do back to even just the 1990s, it's an attitude that pretty much didn't exist back then. Trusting all those companies that have been caught subverting our privacy, is a pretty new phenomenon. People really didn't act this dumb, a mere 15 years ago.
Yeah, I'm British - but I'd miss being able to access Japanese Websites (especially certain blogs, and news sites), and things like KeyHoleTV, as a CS student, who is also studying the language as a hobby. I'd also miss being able to easily obtain Japanese music, and other products (e.g. electronics, and replacement components, books, and audio CDs); and generally being able to communicate with other people from outside of this miserable island.
This will lead privacy-conscious companies to move their IT operations offshore to more secure jurisdictions. And that will lead to more interconnections, not less. The average user seems to think that they have to buy their e-mail, web hosting DNS and other assorted services from the same outfit that provides their DSL line. Not true. And as more people realize that, they'll move to services that can legally tell the NSA to f*k off when they come asking for the private keys.
It will also lead to more peer-to-peer systems. If I run my own e-mail server at home (for my own use), the security services can't come to me for the keys they need to spy on me.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why not? The Germans would never resort to Gestapo tactics.
In case you missed it on /. yesterday:
Half of Tor Sites Compromised, Including TORMail
Related:
Biryukov, Alex, Ivan Pustogarov, and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, Trawling for Tor Hidden Services: Detection, Measurement, Deanonymization, presented at the 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 19-22, 2013, San Francisco, California
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"... allowed to control..." as if there was some agency somewhere with authority that delegated it to the US. Who would disallow it? The UN has no inherent authority over any of the technical processes that the US currently dominates. Anything the US is doing, other countries are free to do on their own, although it would almost certainly lead to everyone else routing around them unless you got a lot of countries to go along with it. Good luck with that.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
an old quote goes
"give me five lines by the most honest of persons and i will find something to hang him for in them"
plus with metadata crimes who you said something to can get you in an interrogation room (assumes you don't get shot while resisting arrest).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Code book 7:
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
It's a lot easier for government to control the people when they cannot see what's truly going on around them.
The Government consists of people. Corruptible, puny humans. Who might find it advantageous to take your credit card info and buy themselves a seal-skin vest.
This is why:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
You sound like some kind of radical. I'll bet if you had a few beefs with the king you'd advocate a revolution.
As an American I know that when you go to school here you're boiled in the history and causes of the Revolution and the Constitution from a young age. That's how it should be. But it amazes me how many people are oblivious to what it really means. This is a country that was created by a bunch of radicals because they had beefs with the government, and wouldn't adopt the Constitution unless a Bill of Rights was added. Yet supposedly being aware of this, people kowtow to the idea of "government necessity" trumping our rights.
Which they most assuredly are if they haven't already. There is a lot sprinkled here and there about how they *can* decrypt stuff we would think secure, how they store all encrypted communication for the purpose of testing their decryption algorithms, etc. If quantum computers are hitting the commercial scene with even the CIA publicly backing one, what are the chances that the NSA DOESN'T have a quantum computer already? I mean it's not like the R&D in the deep and hidden government is behind the rest of the world on this. It's always been ahead. See WW2 and the computer that won that one, cracking codes every day, not revealed until many decades after the war was won. And see all the slashdotted articles about compromised random number generators and algs and such that would completely circumvent your fancy 4kb encryption scheme.
Not that all encrypted communication is just an open book for the feds to peruse, but it sure isn't in a magical bank vault where nobody can get to it.... It's more like it's in a magical bank vault that Tom Cruise and Bond and every bank heist movie star keep breaking into with their fancy gear. More like the bank vault is a plot device... making it appear safe but really just setting it up for the inevitable theft.
The key here is trust. Before people might have said, 'Well AWS, Google, Microsoft won't cave because it would hurt their business models." But now we are even asking if the chips themselves might have back doors. So I suspect that now people are looking at their infrastructure and saying, "Trust nothing" Thus you design your infrastructure to assume that nearly everything is compromised.
But this brings back a new tool into the tool into the toolbox. Security through obscurity. The idea is that if you are using well known protocols and systems then the voracious data monsters may very well have ways to tap into them. But if you adopt the weirdos then you might very well avoid easy data loss. These can be layered. So you might use SSH(or some VPN) for the outer layer but underneath you might even use some homebrew encryption. As everyone knows the chances of getting your own encryption right is low but it takes you out of the realm of automated data harvesting. Some group of humans have to now pick through your protocol and crack it. Then you just keep making regular tweaks to your protocol, not to make it better but to change the weirdness.
But this whole thing is a huge opportunity for a country with good privacy protections. A whole industry of secure routers and whatnot could be created that people would trust. I would infinitely prefer a router from an Icelandic(designed and built) company than a technically better router from Cisco (designed in the US and probably made in China).
Also this is where opensource is going to get a whole lot more interesting. Tools like Skype would be better trusted if the code was opensource (they can still retain the copyrights and say, you can poke through it and compile it for your own use but not modify and distribute it). This way when the NSA demands a back door. Skype can say, "No problem but people will discover it in 5 seconds." On top of that it would be great if tools like skype had better plugins for things like encryption and comm. This way you could download 3rd party tools all day to keep shaking things up. Your buddies would have to have the same plugin but among friends or corporations this would not be a problem.
The ideal setups would allow you to know that your ISP was compromized, your software provider was compromised, and the feds hated you, yet you could still use the Internet in complete privacy.
Personally the only security I would trust if I were wanting perfect secrecy would be one time pads. By hand I would deliver one time pads to my trusted companions (divided into slices and delivered by multiple trusted couriers) and use only those for communications. The occasional HD should suffice for nearly all communications. Also the machines being used for communications would not be networked. You would take the transmission from an (assumed compromised) machine, put it on a storage device, then read it on the trusted non-networked machine using the matching one-time-pad, prepare an encrypted response, and then put it back on the compromised machine for sending. Good luck back dooring that setup.
So what? Many of the things YOU use iin the united states were initially invented in other countries/lands.
The internet comprises of the network infrastructure which belongs to different countries. Parts of the net which reside in those countries and have been paid by them belong to them.
Next you want to say because Graham Bell invented phone, all the phone network of the world belongs to YOU?
How will Apple, HP, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola (for their non-Moto X hardware), etc. email the guys at the Foxconn factory?
FTFY.
- Great Firewall of the UK, China, Iran and Russia .net, .org) are all administered in the US, and this has been used to establish jurisdiction over servers physically located in foreign countries. (See Megaupload, Rojadirecta, TVShack, and the Pirate Bay) -- frequently at the behest of private industry without due process of law
- Undersea cables cut in the Mediterranean knocking entire continents off the network
- Copyright collection agencies deciding what is allowed on the internet and what isn't with no public input or control whatsoever (HADOPI, GEMA, the list goes on for quite a while)
- Several nations' network speeds are so slow as to make the internet unusable for doing anything more than reading text
- Several nations don't have internet connectivity whatsoever (largely island nations, Southeast Asia and Africa)
- ICANN's support of non-English URIs and country-specific TLDs
- US laws like COPPA, CFAA, and the planned CISPA/SOPA, and a USTR hostile to internet freedom
- And this one has been important since the dawn of the internet: ICANN and IANA have always been based in the US and controlled by its government
- The top three biggest TLDs in the entire world (.com,
Are you saying using encryption is gay? Or are you saying if you are a homosexual, you should hide?
The issue here is in part interpretation of the 4th amendment, in part the fact that "meta-data", whatever form it takes, has long been viewed as not being considered "personal papers" and in part it's irrelevant to the large mass of humanity on the Internet. Even if you win the battle in the US and meta-data is either constitutionally protected, it doesn't help much if a US ally doesn't have such stringent protections. A major aspect of what Snowden's leak revealed is that the US and its allies shop the data around, so that if the US can't read an email because it is nominally obeying the 4th Amendment, no problem, the UK will happily do it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Admit it - if it is not in language X it does not exist. :-) Where x: one of English,French,Spanish ....
One of the uses for foreign sites is view and commentary different than CNN International.
You know, sometimes "CNN truth" is not the only version floating around Internet.
Good god, how did this get modded up? The way to deal with a globalization and the myriad cultures on this planet is to stick you fingers in your ears and avoid anything that doesn't interest you directly? How many expats, or 3rd or even 4th generation folks do want access to that? How many "academics," which apaprently to you means "anyone with an interest in a culture I don't care about?" Probably more than you think.
this is absolutely the wrong question to ask, though: have you never heard of innocent people being convicted of serious crimes? mistakes happen all the time. when governments make mistakes, the consequences are a whole lot more severe than when an individual does, acting on his or her own. someone seriously arguing--especially in this day & age--that having nothing to hide means the US government should be able to see anything & everything a US citizen reads/writes online betrays a fantastically naive view of governments and how they use power, irrespective of his or her particular political ideology.
The idea that the spying means balkanization must happen is a false premise.
Anyone with a functioning brain cell who relies on cloud services already knows they're insecure and open to data theft. Those who bought into the hype of cloud services who thought otherwise were only deluding themselves that they could trust a vendor.
You've never been able to trust a vendor with data. If you have/had data that needed to be truly secure, you implemented and maintained your own infrastructure to deal with it; in fact most government and high security contracts require you to do so.
Or did you think someone like a bank would ever rely on something like AWS?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Battle of Athens
The US invented almost everything on that list. Anything that seems to be the opposite was stolen from us by China or Germany.
I guess by that logic, Germany should control the automotive industry (Daimler), Italy control the radio waves (Marconi) and electricity (Volta), etc...
And here I was thinking that information wants to be free!
Well -- that's certainly what we've had drilled into us for the last 40 years by all the techno-utopian hipsters out there.
Looks like we're all about to return to Earth in a big way.
Does not seem to me they do.
There are a number of reasons already mentioned in response, including the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. One more is that if you have proof of some wrongdoing by the government, the government can take action to ensure no one else sees said proof.
Dear Colleague:
Tomorrow I will be sending you the 1GB sample data-sets of the output of the pseudo-random-number generators you are investigating.
[the next day the NSA observes an ftp connection with several 1GB file transfers that appear to contain random data, but which really contain contraband data that has been encrypted and padded in a way to make it look at least as random as a typical 1970s-era random-number-generator, along with a few files with real output of known random-number-generators]
If the file transfers don't go through then I complain to my ISP. If they tell me I have to buy a commercial account, I play ball, and if it still doesn't go through I complain. If they investigate, I show them that my colleague and I really am investigating random numbers but I leave out the part about our side business of aiding the local rebels or whatever it is we are actually doing covertly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There are multiple issues here
1) If Internet traffic travels through country X, then the 3 letter agencies in country X are likely listening.
(The best practices of encryption mostly fix this issue.)
2) If Internet traffic goes to a company in (or owned by) country X, then country X can likely know what the company knows.
(Kind of eliminates the benefits of encryption above.)
3) The US controls some aspects of Internet Governance. (DNS root servers?)
(Probably the worst entity to do this except for all the alternatives.)
IMHO, 1 will get talked through, understood, and limited with x=US. For other countries maybe less so.
2 places a limit on where cloud computing is useful.
3 is still the best available option, even with the recent NSA information
And we Brits want our Turing Machines back!
Your Turing machines? They were invented in America. Yes, by your man, who was admittedly a rather clever fellow. But he only did it when he had the sense to go to the States (Princeton) and study under the American mathematician Alonzo Church.
I think it will be the end of "social networks" and return to the Internet, which based on open source technologies.
The approach - "trust me, trust my closed binaries, as I am good guy" - is over.
I expect clearer interfaces, as people will not trust convoluted websites and OSs anymore.
It could be a chance for small and medium companies from all over the world. Why, for instance, to have one Skype when we can have several competing clients talking via open protocols.
[quote]Customers will act rationally[/quote]
YMMD.
oh I dunno hows about saving your gun toting spray and pray military asses in very war you have fought in since then? Anytime you need a level of precision low level bombing greater than burning down a forrest any forrest even if its in the wrong country.you ask the RAF to do it.
Need spec ops jobs done call the SAS, cant count on the seals after all they are more famous for jumping out of a helicopter and drowning themseleves at the start of missions.
Amazing how rednecks like yourselves recon you have the best military in the world and no one can win without you- well the truth is after 1943 the war would have been won with out or without your troops who werent very combat effective anyways ( may be not without the supllies you SOLD us) and it would have been lost without the RUSSIANS.
Made more amusing of by the self dellusion that this so called 'Best' army can be defeated by redneck merkins with hunting rifles. You needed the French to the fighting in the civil war, the Brits to be indifferent and Washingtons men to do the running away in the revolutionary war and nothings changed since.
These days, the laws are so broad that you're ALWAYS doing something wrong, so there's always reason for the government to look.
Not that it's remotely right, but that's how they set it up. And enforce it.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Can I not say of "what's wrong with the United States Government knowing the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?" that it is absolutely the wrong question to ask?
Your reasoning is why that "why not let them read everything" is the wrong question to ask. Not why "why does the United States Government need to know the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?" is the wrong question.
Scale.
When people use services at scale, it creates focal points for collection or abuse. People have bought into Google,Yahoo, Microsoft. Lazy, cheap people - who have little or no values, little pointless rubber people who accepted the something for nothing offer, and now find that 'their' data - is no longer 'their' data. Suddenly people jump about like these guardian fuckheads.
The beauty of the internet - is that any person can use it. Any person can actually do what they like. You don't have to accept an NSA or FBI world, and you don't have to transit your data in clear text. Do you have to put in work on this? Sure. Does it have to be paid for? Off course.
I grew up in a world where the west larely blocked access to encryption, and todays world is just an extension of the world I've lived in. Do I think that Tempora is aimed at me? No, Its aimed at the islamic fuckheads who should not be inside the borders anyway. But if it was only aimed at them, its like the stop and search - its racist not to do everyone. Thats how twisted things have become.
The irony is that guardian readers operate in a world where they have for extended time operated with leftist bias. They want immigration. They want bad things. Then they want the immigrant seraches to stop 'because its racist'. Now - having supported the introduction of 5th column terrorism and enemies inside the gates, the latest wheeze is crying about big evil american corps and 'govt'. Touch shit. There was a time many years ago where it wasn't required. Now - because of the world the guardian believes in - it is.
I have little time for it. People need to grow up. If your mail was an issue from a privacy standpoint, why did you ever put it on other people servers. The same for Facebook, etc etc. This isn't free, and never was, and always has elements of 'deal with the devil'.
The answer is a simple one. Become a geek. Run your own servers. Run your own data. Its never been easier, nor so low cost to do this. And you can choose your own encryptions or systems. You think the people who built apple, MS, google, yahoo did not rail against the system before becoming part of it?
We`re all equal
Tea Party Republicans were worried about Obama leading the US to communism, or at least extreme socialism. No one saw digital fascism coming, as it crept up on US, and may be deeply rooted now. We'll live with it. We have no choice.
In other words, if you visit certain websites like say ATS and 4chan frequently, you're an easy target if you start speaking your mind against the government. They could easily label you as a conspiracy nutjob that like to fap to bluewaffle without having to go through the extent of proving this because the more you know about the secrets of the government, the more likely you'll get whacked by them. They don't want people to know the shady things they've been doing and they will do whatever it takes to keep it from the public. It's no longer a secret that the obama administration has been blackmailing congress using information collected from PRISM but there are still a lot of tales to tell which if anyone stands up in public, they will find themselves in an unfortunate car accident. Power and control is all the government wants, whether its over the people it's supposed to protect or those in power which they can blackmail since everyone has secrets they would rather keep.
There is this thing called steganography, i.e. hiding stuff in plain sight. Using it you can exchange "legal" messages that have a hidden subchannel. Of course you need more bandwitdth. But given today's internet speeds, even using high strength steganography you would get enough bandwidth for things like email or chat, maybe even voice. Probay not enough for video.
So a dedicated person can find ways to exchange hidden data securely, even when internet is quite closely monitored. However, general public often lacks motivation or the skills to do so. And there are very few convenient tools available. I think we can improve this, we need CONVENTIENT and EASY TO USE secure distributed storage and communications tools.
--Coder
That isn't actually a reason, though. It just says 'some other people a long time ago also thought they shouldn't'. It just asks the question 'why should the US constitution say that?'. There are three deeper reasons which spring to mind. One is that having someone watch you is just creepy, it reduces people's well-being itself. The second is that governments sometimes go all Nazi-y/Stalin-y/burn-all-the-Catholics-y. The third is that governments are made up of individuals who, from the president to the lowliest policeman, can abuse it for personal reasons. For most 'real' people this might mean a dodgy policeman intruding on your life because your son has started dating his daughter, or you've done something he doesn't like, or you're the wrong colour, or anything else. That, I think, is the one most people forget. People dismiss the idea of THEIR country going Nazi because it doesn't happen very often, but it's a lot more plausible to imagine the petty official next door abusing their power - or the permit-granter who doesn't like something about you.
And the police are going to take your word for it????
On a more serious note, sometimes the police are more interested in how you react to being asked if you can search than what they might find if you consent to a search.
If you are asked to search, here's my best guess of the common outcomes:
* Consent, with attitude of "what have I got to hide." Result: Police will think you either have nothing to hide or don't know that you do AND that you are police-friendly. If they find something they will be more likely to believe you really didn't know about it.
* Consent, but without the friendly attitude. Result: The police know that you are a "compliant citizen" and will likely consent to a search if you have nothing to hide that you are aware of OR that they think you won't find what they hid OR that they think they can get the results of a search tossed out of court later.
* No consent, "because my lawyer told me not to." Result: The police know you have legal representation and that you've probably had legal issues in the past and/or anticipate legal issues in the future. On the record, they will treat you with respect but will get a warrant if they think they can. Off the record, the individual police who were there will be watching you and if the department has a good rumor mill, the whole dept. will.
* No consent, hiding behind "you can't do that, it's my rights, blah blah blah." Result: The police will think you are either a non-dangerous civil-libertarian or someone who might try to harm the government. Depending on circumstances they will either bust down the door or just keep an eye on you. They will try to get a warrant if they think they will succeed.
* No consent, and a violent reaction like spitting on a cop that gives them cause to arrest you. Result: You will be arrested and as a result may have legal grounds to search. If so, they will search. If not, they will try for a warrant if they think they can get one.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"They" are humans, "they" already have the power to implement the obvious solution you offer. The social problem part is that "they" won't do that. Now if we attempt to solve that by exchanging all of "they" with people like "us", there will be a lot of dead bodies and the "people like us" will do exactly the same thing as "they" did.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I know I couldn't care any less if I could no longer access Russian or Chinese websites, for instance.
If I could block all data going to and coming from Russian and Chinese IP addresses, I would consider that a feature...
Here in Canada, we have a holiday called Canada Day. People tend to gather at legislative buildings in red or white tshirts and form a giant maple leaf flag for an overhead picture, lots of cake eating, etc. This year in Victoria BC, two losers tried to plant some pressure cooker bombs, presumably in imitation of the Boston Marathon bombers. Three of our company's CoOp students were there, presumably as well as a bunch of other people I know. Nobody got hurt though because the RCMP (the guys in the red uniforms you see in comedies set in Canada) were onto them, monitoring their internet activities and making sure that their bombs didn't have a chance to go boom. We (the general public) don't know the whole story about it yet and probably never will, but it is useful to remember that that are reasons why allowing law enforcement to break a few privacy rules here and there are to be benefit of individuals (specifically those who would otherwise have been killed or maimed in this case).
My congressional rep is a pretty far right "We gotta stop the terr'rists" type.
The Bill-of-rights-defending Tea Party may be staunchly law-and-order but they are even more staunchly individual-rights and (except for abortion, gay sex, and maybe drug use) they are strongly in favor of individual rights and privacy, especially rights like "peaceably assemble" and the right to communicate without being snooped on wholesale.
It's the more moderate law-and-order "we gotta stop the terr'rists (because saying so helps me win elections)" - types that are going to be harder to convince.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And what if, say, the European Union becomes so pissed at the USA over all these revelations that they decide to cut themselves off from the USA's part of the Internet? Then I suppose you will be writing a new post titled "Is there anything useful on the non-USA 'Net?"
And how long will it be from that point on, until you write another piece titled "Is there anything useful on the non-Kentucky 'Net?" Because all you need is access within your State to order a fried chicken delivery, right???
'Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA.',
Incorrect. If the encryption is moved to the client side, where it belongs, then you can achieve a very high degree of safety from surveillance.
We need to start the long, hard process of getting everyone to realize that the "cloud" cannot safely be used as anything other than a public file storage locker, and that all high-security apps belong on the client side where the user has the ability to manage the physical security of the private encryption keys.
This is yet another example of how security is only as good as the physical security that underlies it. Everyone who started using cloud apps for high-security data forgot that crucial fact. If their private encryption key is being held by a vendor, then it's not really private, is it? Oops. They made a huge decision based on a huge mistake. It's time to start over and realize that the physical security of the private keys must be the core of the solution.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
You can tell your relation that the main flaw in her thinking is that she presumes herself 100% legal. The basic reason NOT to allow the government to collect this data is that everyone breaks the law all the time, simply because the law is so complicated, and sometimes unjust (oppressive). Anyone who has private communications exposed becomes a low-hanging fruit for the prosecutors. The public does not benefit from prosecution under irrelevant and/or unjust laws, and the negative outcome is huge: more abuse of power, and a slide towards a police state.
And BT want their hyperlinking. Romans want the alphabet, India want the numerals, Greece the democracy (oh, not using it any more? Fair enough) and the American Indians THEIR FUCKING LAND BACK.
No reason to spy. Spying is not the same thing as "looking". The latter is a normal everyday occurance; the former is harrassment with implied threat.
A member of my family has expressed the following concern: If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, what's wrong with the United States Government knowing the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?
Just because you're not doing something illegal, doesn't mean you don't have something to hide. I can think of a number of legal activities you do not want the government monitoring or recording:
1) Attorney-Client Communications: I'll give you several examples. You may have done nothing wrong, but you still do not want your discussions with your attorney involving your will, your divorce, your crazy mother/father/brother/sister/wife/child's involuntary commitment, etc. recorded or monitored.
For a hypothetical that involves foreigners (and therefore does get monitored if the current leaks are true), patent attorneys with foreign clients may be discussing boring and mundane technical details of a product for a patent to be filed. However, your foreign client still doesn't want a nation state tapping communications to conduct industrial espionage. China does this, and given the recent leaks, I bet the U.S. does too.
2) Maybe you're a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, or Gambler's Anonymous. Nothing illegal about going to meetings (and I commend you for seeking treatment if you do go), but given the NSA's ability to map networks of people, do you really want the NSA to figure out and record the fact that you go to AA/NA/GA meetings? What if that information were made public through negligence (e.g. another leak) or malice (e.g. targeting/blackmailing political opponents).
3) Ever call a suicide prevention hotline? Want that phone call logged and recorded? Want that information made public through negligence (e.g. another leak) or malice (e.g. targeting/blackmailing political opponents)?
My point is that very few people are doing anything illegal, but that a lot of us have something to hide. Information, once recorded, has a habit of escaping.
The most ironic and insidious part of this whole mess is.. They got us to pay for the surveillance network above our taxes. They got us to pay for the cable lines, they got us to pay for the websites, they got us to pay for Windows, they got us to pay for iPhones and Android phones, they got us to practically beg for all of it and take our money.to build our own cages.
"Battle of Athens"
End result? Business as usual.
You were saying?
The government has thrown out the constitution, and voters approve. The end...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Now that's funny.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
This is why I don't save anything in the cloud. Local drives only.
I don't use social media.
I don't email anything that would be considered suspect.
I don't say anything in online chats, games or IM that is suspect either.
Big brother is here to stay....
That isn't actually a reason, though. It just says 'some other people a long time ago also thought they shouldn't'. It just asks the question 'why should the US constitution say that?'.
Well yeah, but that should prompt most people to see what those reasons were. Our founders were concerned that their political views would be used against them in their daily lives. They used psuedonyms to plan the Revolution, and our Bill of Rights reflects that (and many other concerns that they had). Their newsletters of the time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Papers - make it pretty clear what their concerns were and why.
Great question. Now, follow that thread. If members of United States Govt (house members, senators, various agencies, its employees) are not committing crime, then lets put their daily lives in open too. Right ?
This blackmail of Congress of which you speak... it's not working out very well for Obama. He apparently needs better blackmail.
Er, are you making a joke or something?
This is true:
'Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe
http://equipepolishop.com.br
If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, then why does the United States Government need to know
Because a minority of people are committing crimes. Monitoring global communications is useful for learning about plans to commit violent crimes against residents of the United States. In other words: preventing another 9/11.
'cuz dat helps fighting turrrorists, if you know what I mean.
Another way to view it is simply that the NSA has undermined what little security there was. The TSA screening process can be used by terrorists to vet agents because of the way it works, reducing security. The NSA, they undermine security not only by taking personal data and making it accessible and reviewable by a large number of people, but they also implement schemes that presumably allow others to do the same thing. It you create backdoors, you have to exepect that you are the only one that will use them; if you add a new channel, you give 2 targets for someone to listen in; if you shanghai a private corporation for intelligence services, you open everyone to that sort of diversion from their purpose.
Complicity has a cost for these companies. Their shareholders will suffer. People will have a justified sense of mistrust of their government, AND big business.
The US has repeatedly argued to retain control of critical internet infrastructure (e.g. ICANN) on the basis that it can and should be trusted to uphold the freedom and neutrality of the network and allow unfettered global use of it.
And so far, it has done that just about as well as any other country or organization would. I don't know that the US is better than say, some European country or some NGO. The only question I would have is, "why bother changing what works?" Oh yeah, there's stuff going on here or there that the US does that people don't like. I just can't see where anyone else would do any better. After all the Internet is already here, and it already works. If it isn't broken, I don't see why it needs to be "fixed".
What is not illegal now might become illegal in the future.
Then stop doing what's illegal once it's made illegal. That's why the Constitution has prohibited ex post facto crimes even before the Bill of Rights.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The right of the people to be secure [...] against unreasonable searches and seizures
"To me, all searches are reasonable as long as they don't noticeably slow me down."
The problem with encryption is that it is bothesome, cumbersome, easily broken or circumvented by silly goofs and oversights, and generally impedes communication. The great enabling power of the internet is that it lets anybody talk to anybody. Encryption is not a good fit for that model.
Another approach would be global mesh routing, you know, mesh together every AP on the planet and hope no spots get left out. But mesh routing, while a nice idea, has scale problems, and we'll probably start to miss the really fat backbone pipes in a hurry.
The appropriate approach here is "government-technical", as in international law.
We have to get governments to agree to keep their hands off of the data that isn't theirs and they don't need for law enforcement and thus is obtained using a warrant issued for a specific investigation. To make this stick people must understand that data collected "just in case" is a liability for everyone involved and thus that not gathering data, while hard, is the right thing to do. Too bad it's hard to enforce. There'll always be some government transgressing, instituting star chambers, and so on.
It may be easier to get governments to agree to keep their hands off of the parts of the internet that aren't theirs. This probably implies some sort of intergovernmental oversight. But I wouldn't pick the ITU, nor the UN in general. They're too much clubs for governments, as if they knew what was good for the people. They clearly don't. Not even the USA, oh whooshing irony. So ICANN is out too, since it is really an US government subsidiary, regardless of what the both of them claim.
Do note that the USA clearly, literally claimed to be the only one country worthy of safeguarding the internet against wrongdoing governments, only to be shown a pathological liar about such things.
Since we cannot trust any one existing government nor any of the existing bodies, the internet will probably have to become its own country. Including datacentres that no longer stand in the country where they're built, but are now in "internet country", and thus entering the datacentre means crossing an international border. With extradition treaties and everything, but so that not one state can impose its law on all of the internet, as, say, Kentucky and iirc Utah did not too long ago.
The effects needed here are that both you can't be held answerable to the laws in any random country other than the one you're in (or do business with, or have some other clear relationship with), regardless of where the hosts involved physically are hosted, and that being held answerable to the laws of your own country (or do business with) becomes easier.
That, or we could try and get a benevolent global, planetary, government, but literally everyone with any shot at that has so far blown it, to the point that I wouldn't trust anybody else claiming to be that good either. So a separate country for the internet it will have to be. It is the simpler solution.
Encrypt at home or at work ... then the end points are in better control.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
They make things less interconnected, in the name of "uncovering" something already well known in a proper level of detail.
The sooner and the bloodier that the UK takes the Guardian to task (via the US), the better. Same goes for anyone else who thinks of releasing such information - until it becomes something that nobody wants to have on their hands.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Technology is just a tool in the hands of warring nations and sects. The US did not start this war, but needs to end it. Why is anyone surprised that their sacred data would not be unseeable by the US and others? Wake up and smell the future.
If the government knows everything about you though...wouldn't they then know that you did not commit said serious crime?
the WC3 gets credit for drafting HTML, which is just a markup language...internetworked computers and hyperlinks...well that was debuted in 1968:
The a href="http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/12/1209computer-mouse-mother-of-all-demos/">Mother of All Demos
Read it and weep:
the 'world wide web' is nothing more than a concept that Tim Behrners-Lee thought up b/c it would help users contextualize the notion of a 'world wide computer network'...from a technical standpoint it is meaningless
I'm *not* trying to start some kind of flame war over who's country is better!
the facts matter...so many people do not understand computing and it is partially because we say things like 'Tim Behrners-Lee invented the internet'....it just causes so much confusion
Thank you Dave Raggett
"'Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA.'"
They are welcome to the encrypted files on my dropbox and google. Good luck cracking them. And I really hope they are trying hard on the "Secretplans..zip" files that I have in each that are nothing but a dump of /dev/random..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And THAT is exactly why I refuse to store my private data in the cloud. And that is why I never recommend external cloud based solutions to my customers. Keep control of your data.
As US financial institutions and health care providers are audited by the Federal Gov't to the ungodly extent that they are, why are they allowed to send and store confidential client information to could based companies? Of course, cloud based solution providers will never share your data. Really?
At AT&T we always used point to point fiber or other lines for internal office networking. Even though routing via the net is cheaper, we knew then that you only have control over the links you could trace by hand. renting dark fiber was cheap os we also routed phone calls between phone systems (Gotta love early NEC hybrid systems) so that we never had to call long distance. if you picked up a phone in the office of the 232 area code and called a place near the 314 area code, it would route through the fiber to the office that was in the 314 area code and use the POTS lines there to dial out. Worked great and it even spoofed the callerID so that the originating office number was on the outgoing call.
This was in the days of carnivore, and we knew about the boxes and decided to not route any company data over public communication channels. Today we would add in encryption to the fiber links and T1's.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If it balkanizes around NATO-defined lines(excluding Russia, China, and the non-US-controlled portions of Africa), civilized countries will have no problems with each other. Western Europe, US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the like would have no problem talking with each other.
The only loss would be the countries that end up dragging down product quality, causing job losses, and otherwise making it a Very Bad Day in every way towards the First World. Perhaps if they westernized themselves and stopped being used as means to grind down First World workers, they might have a chance.
The whole irony in this is that Snowden would end up causing the greatest loss in freedom in the name of trying to cause a modest increase.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I think Alan Turing and Brits are great, but really I'm asking in a non-flame way, what has the idea of a 'Turing machine' done to advance computing, from a **technical** perspective?
Sure, in computer science 101 the idea of 'Turing completeness' in computation theory is important, but it is more like a property of mathmatics than any theory that is usable for prediction.
It's like how history records that DeSoto 'discovered' the Mississippi River...I mean it was there, and being used by humans in a different context, but one guy, DeSoto gets credit for 'discovering' it.
Usable for prediction...that's what I mean for this context as a 'good' theory...i'm not interested in thought experiments
To me the 'Church-Turing Thesis' is like DeSoto discovering the Mississippi.
Compare to the Attanasoff/Berry computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff/Berry_computer It's almost the opposite of Llamba calculus because Attanasoff devised the computer as a way to do laborious Calculus calculations quickly.
Isn't computing more an engineering and linguistic challenge than a theoretical persuit?
Really, what, besides the obvious benefits of classroom use, has Turing's theories done to advance computing that wouldn't have been done throught the natural progression from the Attanasoff/Berry computer?
Thank you Dave Raggett
'Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes?'
This was always my argument against the cloud, it has and always will seem an absurd idea to allow others to manage your critical assets, the loss/responsibility factor alone makes it an absurd idea. They lose a customer you lose everything.
One of the things about this NSA surveillance, if you drop to a 70's style life suddenly no one knows where you are or what you're doing, the better they get at watching people digitally via metadata/data the lower your profile if you don't use these things.
I guess for a young person this might be hard to conceptualize much less do, but it isn't as bad as it sounds =)
I have wondered what a World where everyone knows what everyone else is doing would be like.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
And why should I take the governments word for it that I have nothing to fear?
Here are some other likely outcomes:
* Consent, with attitude of "what have I got to hide." Result: In the course of a search, the police find something that causes trouble for you. It may be something which is not illegal, but still makes the police suspicious, causing further harassment. It may be that it's not illegal at all, but it's simply private information which is compromising. It may be that the police were asking to search you in the first place because they had an agenda (e.g. they have a personal grudge, or a quota to fill), and even finding nothing doesn't stop them from harassing you.
* Consent, but without the friendly attitude. Result: Same as above.
* Consent, but without the friendly attitude. Result: Police become frustrated and continue to harass you, rationalizing that you're "probably hiding something."
* No consent, hiding behind "you can't do that, it's my rights, blah blah blah." Result: Same as above.
* No consent, and a violent reaction like spitting on a cop: Violent beat-down.
Now I'm not saying that my outcomes *will happen* or even that they're more likely than your outcomes. I'm just saying that your outcomes are relatively optimistic, and mine are certainly not unheard of. I would argue that part of the reason we don't see more outcomes like the ones I offer is that the courts, as well as public opinion, have done a decent job of coming down hard on police abuses. Still, these kinds of things happen with some frequency. The outcomes I list don't even really accuse the police of corruption or illegal activity. It only assumes that the police are human, and may sometimes act out of suspicion, cynicism, anger, or frustration.
There are no innocent people.
There are so many laws today that you've probably committed six crimes before breakfast. If laws were actually enforced, not only would everyone be in jail, but they'd rapidly discover that the laws are so inconsistent that they can't even tell whether or not some things are crimes.
Since I'm not doing anything wrong you have no reason to spy.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Also, while you can encrypt to your hear's content, how do you pass people you want to communicate to securely a private key to encrypt and decrypt with? You going to email it? Perhaps text it via SMS? Or, you could call them up and tell them the key? As soon as you transmit a key over a service they control, you are no longer really encrypted. You can meet someone in person to pass a key, but that really only works for people you are physically close to.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Look, it's not just the US that does this, it's every developed nation. The UK does it the EU does it the Far East and Middle East nations do it, no there's no escaping it.
Why do they do it? National security- same reason the US does it.
Fact: the internet is how non-state actors plan their violence, raise their money, spread their vision, do reconnaissance . Of course it gets state scrutiny- as much as the state can bring to it.
The reason that's a Big Deal in the news now is because the U.S. government appears to be contravening the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment and lying about it to the American people, and purely instrumental John Yoo-style of "findings" does not count as "lawful".
It's pretty clear to all Americans that their internet searches, their contacts, the time place and duration of those contacts qualify as their "papers" which the Constitution expressly says shall be free from unreasonable search and further that capturing those and rifling through them, analyzing them, drawing conclusions and inferences about the people behind them and then indexing all that away under the key Smith, John , well that's pretty much the definition of "search".
To Americans, myself included, that's a big fucking deal and something that needs to be publicly, seriously and and in a sustained and methodical way considered with the goal of reaching a consensus about how we should go forward.
The government ignores this at their own peril: the terrorist have as their explicit goal to provoke reactions from the US government which de-legitimize that government in the eyes of its own people. They intend to do this and it's their greatest and perhaps only real weapon.
The purpose of doing that is divide the nation against itself and thus generate home-grown discontents which they can cynically join in a common cause (hating the US government). One of the reasons we haven't been hit the way the UK and say Spain have been is because, aside from sleeper cells composed of foreign nationals, al Queda is having a tough time finding Americans who want to support them locally.
Provoking such responses from the US government also serves to undermine the US government's legitimacy with their foreign partners by de-legitimizing the US with those nation's citizens.
So far, they're winning. They won with Abu Graib (thanks Cheney!!!!! Thanks Yoo !!! ) . They won when they turned the Depatment of Justice into a made-to-order *legal* sausage factory , thanks to Yoo , Cheney, David Addington Jay Bybee and Alberto Gonzales.
Now they're poised to win again with this shit. This time it's structural. As one of his first official acts, Obama nullified and set aside all of messy diapers John Yoo left behind in the DoJ. But this time, it's all going to be carried forward.. it's going structural folks. You need to take this seriously.
This is Obama's legacy. This and what he does about climate change are the things history will judge him on, Obamacare is small beans in comparison.
At this exact moment in history Snowden has given him something no one could have foreseen- the perfect excuse to engage the nation in a meaningful debate over complex and fast changing relationship between personal privacy and national security and the 4th Amendment.
It's been presented to him on a mother fucking silver platter, and is he going to engage the nation like a goddamn motherfucking leader and bring us, together, as a nation, as Americans into a shared and accepted understanding about this issue strong enough to take us forward into the next century or is he going to blink this nettlesome thing before him away and let mere circumstance, some random future chain of unfortunate events decide the issue for us in a way that is incoherent, chaotic, instrumental and divisive?
Which is it going to be, Mr. President? This is an issue that is all, and only, up to you.
That's the REAL issue that no one in the main stream media is talking about.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Cardinal Richelieu
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Because knowledge of even noncriminal activities can be terribly powerful tool and concentrations of such powers are enablers for tyranny.
tl;dr: It's not about YOU. It's about THEM.
Next one?
Karl Benz, moron...from the library of congress:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/auto.html
amen. well said (ed han). One needs to consider what happens when the government does anything deceptive, dodgey, unethical or criminal - and wishes to evade public notice. This policy suppresses whistle-blowers clearing the way for all of the above.
If these cloud service and web service providers tank and lose money, does that mean they'll sue the NSA and FBI for damages?
Just wondering... :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
except with web-mail email is delivered at endpoint via www
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Well, imagine that there are people in the government who are committing a serious crime. Imagine your family member gains knowledge of that. They go to the local paper with evidence.
But it turns out that the government guys know that the newspaper's editor has been having an affair, something they gained knowledge of as part of their innocent little data gathering. In fact, they know something serious about every newspaper editor because, hey, let's face it, everyone has some secrets. And every time something important comes out or is about to come out, the people involved are suddenly embroiled in sex or drug scandals and are discredited.
Now imagine this has been happening since the 1960s.
They were invented in America. Yes, by your man, who was admittedly a rather clever fellow. But he only did it when he had the sense to go to the States (Princeton) and study under the American mathematician Alonzo Church.
No, they were invented by Babbage. Church invented a new, equivalent form after him just as Turing invented a new, equivalent form after that.
breaking news, sky is blue.
A member of my family has expressed the following concern: If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, what's wrong with the United States Government knowing the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?
A friend of mine expressed that what is wrong with it is that your family member is an idiot.
How about a nationally-distributed billboard that simply says:
THEY KNOW
and a simple, easily remembered web address to explain the grave dangers of the federal government having the capacity and desire to harvest and log every citizens' transgressions, as we _all_ have secrets that haunt us.
That might actually resonate thru the fat layers of American ambivalence.
Because citizens of the United States might get a whiff of all the abuse of power that's going on in the government and try to do something about it. Hence, even a law-abiding citizen is a threat to the authorities - perhaps more so than the real criminals - and must be monitored along with everyone else.
Don't know how reliable this stat is(http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-still-dominates-global-internet-traffic-101026/), but apparently P2P (BitTorrent mostly) is presently the largest in most areas of the world, followed or led by 'real time entertainment' (i.e. streaming video). It's an open question whether real time entertainment (which is usually inside a web browser) counts as web or not.
There's other data out there (lots of it) but it appears that reletive to other protocols, email has fallen off a cliff. Interestingly, mobile internet traffic is now larger than the entire Internet in 2002.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
A member of my family has expressed the following concern: If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, what's wrong with the United States Government knowing the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?
It's because the US is a countries of laws. One of those laws, the Constitution, says that the government cannot invade your privacy without a warrant. It's the government's jobs to prove it has probable cause.
It's the government's job to prove it should have access.
Your family member does not understand Liberty or enumerated powers at all. Send them back to civics class.
Good-bye
You should never, ever talk to police.
EVER.
FYI, when someone's being arrested and the cops tell them, "you have a right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you ," they mean it literally.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
A member of my family has expressed the following concern: If a citizen of the United States is not committing a crime, what's wrong with the United States Government knowing the full text of everything that he reads and writes on the Internet?
Nothing.
The problem is not that it's "wrong" for others to know what you're doing (be they your neighbors or your government). The problem is that our society's solution to the fact that everyone has their own (often mutually exclusive) definition of what behavior is acceptable and what isn't is willful ignorance (privacy).
Most people are not obeying all the laws (teens drink, people speed, blow-jobs are illegal in many states, etc.).
The best solution would be to change the laws so that they more accurately reflect what society actually things is right/wrong. However then we run into the other problem, that people can't agree on a large enough scale about what should/should not be allowed.
This is why:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Long story short? Unless the government has demonstrable cause to read/know the full text of "everything", it's none of their fucking business.
Government's trump card: National Security Letter
The People's trump card: Constitutional Supremacy Clause
The Government declared the Constitution of the United States of America as a "worthless piece of paper".
Considering that "worthless piece of paper" is the only document that actually authorized a federal government, I'd say that's a really bad idea on their part.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
That isn't actually a reason, though. It just says 'some other people a long time ago also thought they shouldn't'. It just asks the question 'why should the US constitution say that?'.
If anyone ever actually asks you that, start going through their pockets without asking; I'm betting they'll figure out the "why" pretty damn quick.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
As Cardinal Richelieu allegedly said,
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
You can tell your relation that the main flaw in her thinking is that she presumes herself 100% legal.
... and to preemptively cover the inevitable response of, "dur dur dur, never done anything wrong, dur dur dur," wrong and illegal are not necessarily confluent; sometimes you can do everything right and still be guilty of breaking some law.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Let me get this straight. Did you really just say that, because you believe that "most people" lead a one-country/one-language existence, I'm obliged to give up the global life I've led for most of the last 30 years?
Just who the hell do you think you are?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The right to freely use communication technology is very deeply connected to the right to free speech. That is why the 1st amendment included the freedom of "the press". When they mention freedom of the press, they aren't talking about "the freedom of an organized industry of reporters" that we have come to know as "the press". They're talking about the freedom to use printing presses. Literally.
And there's a reason for it being mentioned. They knew that the freedom of speech doesn't mean a whole lot if the government can quash your ability to distribute what you say. That is, being free to speak to yourself, without the ability to have your message reach others, is not having free speech.
So yes, having free, unfettered, secure Internet access is exactly a "freedom of speech" issue.
Blahblahblah not my country blahblahblah not my language blahblahblah not interesting to me blahblahblah shouldn't be used by anyone else either blahblahblah, that's why.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I'm all for it if keeps those laggers off my BattleNet realm.
You would have no problem then with me entering your house going through your file cabinets and photo copying all your paper work , bills, loans, work, tax forms, medical records, etc..?
If I could block all data going to and coming from Russian and Chinese IP addresses...
...I'd come kick your ass for disconnecting me from my in-laws.
How wonderfully naive. Did Julian Assange rape 2 women (one "previously" worked for the CIA)? They say yes, he says no. He's been (de facto) imprisoned for more than a year in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for it.
How about former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Khan? He wanted to take the global economy away from the dollar into the Euro. The next time he was in the US he "raped" his maid and was imprisoned for 3 months, long enough for him to lose his position at the IMF. After a successor was named in the IMF, the case was dropped for "lack of evidence".
They've done the same thing with Kim Dotcom at Megaupload. They don't have a case but they seized and destroyed all his data because the puppet masters at the MAFIAA companies don't like him. After a couple years, they'll drop the case.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
No. Their are people who simply can't sleep at night knowing other people are doing things without their knowledge. They are hard wired for this.
Take my neighbor for example: A camera crew from VH1 was here to interview my tenant (a Warhol factory person), she comes running down the driveway "Whats going on! Whats going on!" We all went inside, and the started recording the interview. Then we heard a noise in the hall, had to stop recording, opened the door and there she was at the top of the stairs with here ear to the door! Same thing when an ambulance was called for my father, she marched right in with the EMT's to see whats going on.
My point is they can't live without sticking their nose everywhere.. Go figure.
The Arthur here misses the real deal. The world will be Balkanised In the same way that I cant cross from Arizona to Mexico as the passport cost more than the reason I was going. You wont be able to travel from any of these areas to another the wars to divide it all up have not yet been played out but will soon be.
Encrypt at home or at work ... then the end points are in better control.
Of course. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. But if I'm in Italy doing business with Canadian Big Bank, and Canadian Big Bank's key that protects https: traffic is ultimately signed by an American top-level signing authority, AND the traffic goes over US soil, can I really trust that the American Government won't be able to figure out that I'm talking to Canadian Big Bank and use their "pull" with the top-level signing authority to decrypt my communication?
Add some country-to-country encryption on top of this and they'll never even realize I'm talking to Canadian Big Bank, only that someone in Italy is talking to someone in Canada. They will also know the IP addresses of where the traffic got encrypted in Italy and where it will be decrypted in Canada.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What he said x 5
Even experienced lawyers can't necessarily tell you what's legal or illegal outside of their particular specialties.
There's a simple enough reason for this. Every single year we add thousands of state laws and hundreds of federal laws.
Al Gore created the internet so it is clearly his fault. He probably also created Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. Wow, he must be really busy.
"Customers will act rationally"
I suppose there's a first time for everything.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
It was there from the beginning. You know, all those old bullshit regions vis-à-vis media distribution never went away. The fact that this also affected other concerns is just part of the machine in play.
what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
we'll ALL die someday.
the internet is NOT thrustable.
if they want to bug my computer with bad
code that slows down my computer whilst
shooting monster and mutated people, so be it.
if they really want to read my email, what can i do?
you have to thrust something else you can just go
live in a cave.
it's part of the world. it rains sometimes and sometimes
the weather is grand. mostly it rains after washing the car though.
people have different views of the world. fortuantly they
CANT process time faster then other humans and be in two places
at the same time. *phew*
some people like "this", other people like something else, that's
how the world works. the internet it great to see all these
opinion (or lack thereof).
the funny thing is, that people that you like become trustworthy
or "smooth" but things you don't like become "rough" and stick out.
just take a stop back, realize that the universe is not fair.
the elements that make up the universe, that is people, can make
mistakes.
some people know this and go about carving a niche of pleasure
for themselfs out of this "mess". don't hate them for it.
realize that the universe gives us all that we need and
everything man made has inherent flawes.
keep good ideas to yourself unless you're sure it's okay
if someone else "steal" and montetizes it but with the
side-effect that in the end everybody profits.
(example: you discover antibiotics. it's okay if soemone
else steals this idea and becomes rich, because in the end,
the world overall has become a better place.)
also realize that the UNIVERSE knows! that YOU had the idea first.
you can't bribe the universe : )
in the end, all the REAL rules apply to everyone, rich or poor.
keep your eyes open. the universe is a big place.
purple green blue yellow
How does the US government know that a citizen is not committing a crime? This is a guilty until proven innocent philosophy. But there is a problem with treating someone as a criminal first and a citizen second. A second problem is all those citizens who clamour "think of the children" or "trust the government" cannot see how this magnifies the first problem.
Not quite the same thing, so you are making a strawman. Snooping on the internet is like the government opening all your snail mail and parcels: The US collects meta-data on them too, by the way. Trespassing into your house would equate to installing a key-logger or screen-grabber on your computer, which is done to only a small percentage of the population.
I daren't reply to any threads for fear of a government recording a link between me and one of you crazy strangers.
I know this also holds true for most Americans and Australians, and many Europeans, too.
What makes you think Australia and Europe will continue to be your (digital) thralls? If the economic crisis continues, I'd guess we're dividing at inner-European borders again in 10 years.
Its a crime if you do it, but not if I do it.
I think users of foreign countries depending on US based infrastructure is a mistake. Not only can't we be trusted for obvious reasons the more power is disaggregated the better off everyone is. Don't send us your money...build more interconnects and hosting centers locally in your communities.
We are all better served when we take responsibility for our data and run/host our own services rather than depend on a handful of massive content companies to do everything for us.
The Internet is at no risk of being broken up into a series of disconnected tube islands. There is ever increasing value in maintaining global connectivity.
The network does seem to be at some risk of becoming a network of spectators.
Bittorrent of movies and TV shows.
I don't agree that cutting the internet (one of mankind's greatest inventions: a massive repository of information and nearly instantaneous communication with anybody, nearly everywhere in the world) is a positive thing at all. Since I don't get any meaningful traffic (not spam or hack attempts) from China, Russia, etc, I blocked those network blocks at my router. After doing so, I did notice that downloading stuff via bittorrent was considerably slower. I guess there are lots of seedboxes in those countries.
No knock warrants on wrong houses... The government is made up of people and people make mistakes. Wait until some SWAT team with a no knock warrant and M16s drawn and then you can say "well I had nothing to hide". This has happened, it is not a theoretical straw man. The constitution was written to save you from these.
I have heard: "I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide from someone I trust".
Bah on healthcare.gov! That crappy site does NOT tell you if your existing insurance quote/unquote qualifies. The whole thing is B.S. My insurance company just jacked up my rates 25% this year. Not surprisingly, the premiums just happen to match the numbers effing healthcare.gov shows you would be paying if you went with them. Oh, and that's on top of 25% from last year that magically happened after the SCOTUS ruling.
What you're totally missing is the fact that the government doesn't have to make a profit on their garbage. What's infinitely worse is that they don't even have to cover their expenses because the money all comes out the the tax base. Private insurers won't be able to compete with that. Oh, but they can't refuse to cover you. Sure, at much higher premium which you won't be able to afford so you'll be willing to take the government plan. But why are so many special interest groups and federal agencies getting exemptions? Weren't we told the ACA was going to be the cat's tits?
You're also mistaking coverage for treatment in the same way that you mistake health insurance for health care. Just because the government says you're covered doesn't mean you're going to get top-of-the-line treatment. You're not. Try reading up on the IPAB and what it's real power is. A group of unelected, unaccountable functionaries with no medical training will be decided what forms of treatment get covered. Here's a very real world (not theoretical) example: You get Wet AMD. There are two drugs for treating it. Avastin is one and Lucentis is the other. Avastin has the nasty side effect of significantly increasing the likelihood that you'll get glaucoma. Lucentis doesn't have that problem. Avastin is $50 a shot and Lucentis is $1000 a shot (yes you get poked in the eye with a syringe). According to IPAB rules, they will not cover treatment with Lucentis because it's too expensive. Period. Think you're going to get a hip replacement? Wrong. Here's a cheaper bottle of Motrin. Have a nice day.
And since you brought up HMOs, let's talk about that for a moment. HMOs were supposed to "fix" healthcare. In reality, what happened was that new layers of bureaucracy were inserted between the doctor and the patient. All of those layers of bureaucracy had to get a salary and benefits and perhaps a pension. Where was that money supposed to come from? Those overpromised "savings" never materialized. But instead of chucking that system, those who invented it refused to believe that they couldn't fix it by adding more bureaucracy in the form of the feds. Now it's not just a train wreck but a missile the size of the Chrysler Building loaded with nuclear waste.
Doesn't IRS Form 1040 and all its attendant schedules, state taxes on personal property already do that? ...except they make YOU do all the work?
Neelie Kroes raise European Commission hypocrisy level. She acknowledge being spied, but that does not prevent them from discussing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which a secret mandate that is obviously only secret to European citizen. Obviously the US knows the EU mandate, which makes the bargain quite inequitable.
Indians want the Zero back
I'm starting to wonder if "tepples" isn't a deliberate troll account
It's not, unless you consider a devil's advocate argument to necessarily equal trolling. If my posts seemed excessively inflammatory, I apologize. I have a social learning disability, and sometimes I lack perfect control of it. In this case, I'm just relaying a question that a family member asked me. When discussing the value of privacy from the government, as opposed to privacy from the private sector, the family member made the argument that someone not violating current law has nothing to hide. Thank you for the examples you gave. In the future, is there something special that I should write in order to show my sincerity in seeking answers to tough, fundamental questions so that I don't look like a troll?
You left out the bit about someone planting evidence in each scenario; example: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2013/07/30/plant-it-and-it-will-grow/
This book has a chapter on how even the best of police officers can go bad through cognitive dissonance and progressive desensitization (although bad training can speed that): http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0156033909
Still, it's a tough situation for a police officer to constantly be making difficult decisions in often ambiguous circumstances, knowing there really are some at-the-moment messed up people out there, and also directed by politicians to enforce a lot of problematical laws (e.g. the drug war). In that sense, it's amazing many (most?) do their jobs as well as they do.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The fourth amendment applies to unreasonable searches, I'll agree. But see Obfuscant's comment about reasonable searches. NSA fans would claim that any passive examination of call logs and Internet packet headers is a reasonable search.
It's easy to tell what is a crime and who has committed one.
The person with the highest paid lawyer wins.
Not only that but person-or-interest-group with the largest bucket of cash writes most laws these days anway.
Being poor IS a crime these days (effectively).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
From your link: "If the police are talking to you, itâ(TM)s because they suspect you have committed a crime."
No, that's bullshit. They talk to lots of people to gather evidence. If nobody talked to the police, crimes wouldn't be solved.
I mean, you have to figure they have been into everything about everyone at this point. All the code, all the passwords are now compromised. What part of if can you trust at this point?
If feels like someone took a big shit on the technical world.
Wish I knew. Perhaps he could have a little chat with my friends and family. I have very close family on two continents and good friends on 5 continents. These aren't facebook friends either. I met every single one of them face to face and spent significant time with all them face to face.
Boooooo
No one cares!
From your link: "If the police are talking to you, itâ(TM)s because they suspect you have committed a crime."
No, that's bullshit. They talk to lots of people to gather evidence. If nobody talked to the police, crimes wouldn't be solved.
No, that's bullshit - crimes are solved by the examination of evidence, not dubious third-party accounts. If police are relying on witnesses to actually solve cases, witnesses who may be liars, or forgetful, or bored, then they aren't doing their jobs correctly.
Not to mention, I think you're conflating detectives with patrol officers; world of difference betwix the two.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
crimes are solved by the examination of evidence, not dubious third-party accounts
Try watching some real detective shows where they follow along with a camera as (typically) murders are solved. Talking to people is crucial, and leads to non-witness evidence. You really don't know what you are talking about.
Not to mention, I think you're conflating detectives with patrol officers; world of difference betwix the two.
Please cite where a distinction is made when advised not to talk to the police.
crimes are solved by the examination of evidence, not dubious third-party accounts
Try watching some real detective shows where they follow along with a camera as (typically) murders are solved. Talking to people is crucial, and leads to non-witness evidence. You really don't know what you are talking about.
No, I don't waste time watching crime dramas and pretending they're indicative of reality, you've got me there.
Not to mention, I think you're conflating detectives with patrol officers; world of difference betwix the two.
Please cite where a distinction is made when advised not to talk to the police.
In the brains of people capable of cogent reasoning.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Try watching some real detective shows where they follow along with a camera as (typically) murders are solved. Talking to people is crucial, and leads to non-witness evidence. You really don't know what you are talking about.
Ah ha! So that's why government wants to spy and collect all our communications! No need to talk to anyone when you can just look up a database!
No, I don't waste time watching crime dramas and pretending they're indicative of reality, you've got me there.
They are reality. Do you think they put on a separate investigation just for the camera? I'm not talking about "Law and Order" or "CSI".
In the brains of people capable of cogent reasoning.
In other words, you have none. Cogent reasoning will tell you that law enforcement is law enforcement, and no distinction is made when people give advice to not talk to the police.
No, I don't waste time watching crime dramas and pretending they're indicative of reality, you've got me there.
They are reality. Do you think they put on a separate investigation just for the camera? I'm not talking about "Law and Order" or "CSI".
Please cite where a distinction is made that the tv shows you're talking about aren't "Law and Order" or "CSI."
PS - See what I did there?
Cogent reasoning will tell you that law enforcement is law enforcement, and no distinction is made when people give advice to not talk to the police.
Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep at night, I guess. I was pretty sure most people know the difference between cops, detectives, SWAT teams, etc., but I suppose you've successfully proven that assumption wrong.
From now on, I'll be sure to ask the authors of every website I ever discuss to make sure they spell out exactly how they define every little term used, just for you. Happy now?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
An then Google says "not allowed to host your own servers on our fiber network". Hmm... Also, the fact that we debate weather or not a "by the book traitor" is in fact a traitor, speaks volumes to the nature of unconstitutional behaviors. Corruption can not proliferate; evil begets evil. This is why we now feel that other truths and laws do not always apply. We should punish all who are at fault and stand on our fundamental beliefs to Life, Liberty, and the United States Constitution.
He is crazy if you think about it; I am not.
We all are bonded labor as long as govt has monopoly/hegemony over printing currency.
Casteism
Please cite where a distinction is made that the tv shows you're talking about aren't "Law and Order" or "CSI."
PS - See what I did there?
Yes, you made an ass out of yourself. I can easily cite the difference: Law & Order "is an American police procedural and legal drama television series, created by Dick Wolf and part of the Law & Order franchise"
and from legal drama: "A legal drama is a television show subgenre of dramatic programming. This subgenre presents fictional drama about law."
48 Hours: "48 Hours is an American documentary television series that airs on CBS. The series has been broadcast on the network since January 19, 1988."
I was pretty sure most people know the difference between cops, detectives, SWAT teams, etc., but I suppose you've successfully proven that assumption wrong.
Ok, since you can't cite a difference, let me ask you personally: Is it ok to talk to detectives, but not patrol officers? Or is it vice-versa?
Please cite where a distinction is made that the tv shows you're talking about aren't "Law and Order" or "CSI."
PS - See what I did there?
Yes, you made an ass out of yourself. I can easily cite the difference: Law & Order "is an American police procedural and legal drama television series, created by Dick Wolf and part of the Law & Order franchise"
and from legal drama: "A legal drama is a television show subgenre of dramatic programming. This subgenre presents fictional drama about law."
48 Hours: "48 Hours is an American documentary television series that airs on CBS. The series has been broadcast on the network since January 19, 1988."
Movin' the ol' goalposts, are we? Neat.
However, fact remains you committed the same sin you lambasted me for. Then got all butthurt and snarky about it. Just sayin'.
I was pretty sure most people know the difference between cops, detectives, SWAT teams, etc., but I suppose you've successfully proven that assumption wrong.
Ok, since you can't cite a difference, let me ask you personally: Is it ok to talk to detectives, but not patrol officers? Or is it vice-versa?
Like I said, pretty sure most people already know this, but...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_ranks_of_the_United_States
Deciding whether or not to speak to one of any rank is a personal decision. YMMV, I prefer to not risk it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You share public keys, not private keys. If you're sharing private keys, you're doing it wrong.
Movin' the ol' goalposts, are we? Neat.
However, fact remains you committed the same sin you lambasted me for. Then got all butthurt and snarky about it. Just sayin'.
I honestly don't know what the fuck you are talking about. You asked, I delivered. The only person moving the goalpost is you. "Just sayin'".
Deciding whether or not to speak to one of any rank is a personal decision. YMMV, I prefer to not risk it.
In other words, you offer no distinction in the context under consideration. Moving the goalposts. "Just sayin'."
If it balkanizes around NATO-defined lines(excluding Russia, China, and the non-US-controlled portions of Africa), civilized countries will have no problems with each other. Western Europe, US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the like would have no problem talking with each other.
The only loss would be the countries that end up dragging down product quality, causing job losses, and otherwise making it a Very Bad Day in every way towards the First World. Perhaps if they westernized themselves and stopped being used as means to grind down First World workers, they might have a chance.
The whole irony in this is that Snowden would end up causing the greatest loss in freedom in the name of trying to cause a modest increase.
What makes you think it will balkanize in a way that's convenient? That's why a balkanized Internet is a bad thing: You have no predictable idea HOW it will be split up. It is (very easily) conceivable to me that a non-trivial number of those "civilized" countries would heartily favor cutting off Internet contact with us--if nothing else, it creates the perception that they're cutting off the NSA spying by cutting off the American public.
Let me put it to you this way: This NSA program is in the process of creating a demand for the very thing we've feared since day one--turning the Internet from a self-publishing medium into cable television. That is to say, a one-way medium that purveys only crap and costs 3-5 times what it should cost.
I fail to see how that's a "good thing."
Also, those "uncivilized" countries won't be that way forever. At some point they're going to want to buy our goods and services--if we balkanize to "protect" our "right" to spy on everybody and everything worldwide via the Internet I see it as a direct example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Who did what now?
Movin' the ol' goalposts, are we? Neat.
However, fact remains you committed the same sin you lambasted me for. Then got all butthurt and snarky about it. Just sayin'.
I honestly don't know what the fuck you are talking about. You asked, I delivered. The only person moving the goalpost is you. "Just sayin'".
Yea, I've noticed a distinct decline in reading comprehension abilities over the last several years. Shame, that.
Deciding whether or not to speak to one of any rank is a personal decision. YMMV, I prefer to not risk it.
In other words, you offer no distinction in the context under consideration. Moving the goalposts. "Just sayin'."
Like I said, whatever you've got to tell yourself to sleep at night. FWIW, most people I talk to here don't require every single little thing explained to them in great detail - they understand that we're all connected to the same internet, so if anyone wants clarification of a topic they are free and able to go look it up for their own goddamn selves. Of course, most people I talk to in general don't blame me personally for the content on other people's websites, as you've done.
Anyway, I'm done with this conversation. I've thoroughly enjoyed watching you increase your own blood pressure for no good reason, though. Thanks for the chuckle.
Have a good one.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yea, I've noticed a distinct decline in reading comprehension abilities over the last several years. Shame, that.
It's a shame somebody can't create a logical argument and expects their bullshit to stick.
FWIW, most people I talk to here don't require every single little thing explained to them in great detail - they understand that we're all connected to the same internet, so if anyone wants clarification of a topic they are free and able to go look it up for their own goddamn selves.
Pathetic. After all these posts, you want to play the Google card. Your argument failed. Google can't save you. You even admitted that when asked personally for a distinction, you would treat the two the same when being asked questions.
I've thoroughly enjoyed watching you increase your own blood pressure for no good reason, though. Thanks for the chuckle.
Congratulations of making an ass out of yourself and trying to play it like a joke at the end. Maybe one day you'll find some intellectual honesty.
Good to know it's not just me in that situation. Regards from Guangzhou, where I'm visiting with my soon-to-be in-laws. :)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I am saying that that was the correct course of action then, and it is the correct course of action now. What you The People, do, is actually up to you. It's basically your choice, I see you've made yours.
'Reforming' the world is not my bag. We all know how well fucking for chastity works out. Each and every person has to reform himself.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That's part of it, yes. But I wasn't going into the how.
So What?!? On the basis of what you say do you expect all of us, i.e.the INNOCENT Ones to just lie down and let the governments just grind us all into the grouns!
seriously?
You might nog be committing a crime by the rules of today, but rules tend to change with the hands that hold the reins of power. Every once in a while that means they change drastically, at which point those previously innocent bits of speech might well get you imprisoned or killed.
the following Cardinal Richelieu quote is also a good reason: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”. You might piss of the wrong person and taking something out of context is one the best ways to screw someone over if you have power and they don't.