Slashdot Mirror
NZ Professor Advocates Civil Disobedience Against Mass Surveillance
nut writes "We're all aware of how much surveillance we are under on the internet thanks to Edward Snowden. Gehan Gunasekara, an associate commercial law professor at Auckland University in New Zealand, wants us all to start sending suspicious looking but meaningless data across the internet to overload automated surveillance systems. Essentially he is advocating a mass distributed Bayesian poisoning attack against our watchers."
Just sending a bunch of keywords in email isn't enough - emacs has had a spook function since the 80s so they are kind of used to that stuff by now./ You'll have to act like a crazy-pants terrorist.
To make it really work we need to bring the eternal september to the islamic extremist websites. Everybody go post on those arabic jihadi websites. Uh, does anyone know of any arabic jihadi websites? Or how to read and write arabic?
What does that even mean?
Death metal to America!
We should do this, and make user-friendly encryption tools more widely available to the non-geek community as well.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
They want us to help them improve their automated monitoring.
...you first.
Automate it for me and my lasy American ass will do it.
Encrypted data is suspicious looking but meaningless. Encrypt everything. Use Tor to read the news (why not? It escapes your local filter buble). Host Tor hidden services for your random home servers (it makes them look like clients to get around ISP limits and beats NAT+firewalls as a bonus).
Oh, and america bomb freedom jihad.
Posted from my Tor browser, with JavaScript security holes!
Maybe browsers should come with such a feature by default, with the possibility to disable it if/when you want. There's at least one Firefox add-on that does something similar (random searches on main search engines).
This was already suggested and implemented a good 30 years ago when this exact same thing was suspected. There is even a (still in upstream as I recall) minor mode for emacs' MUA that will attach random terrorist-looking keywords to your mail.
I've been convincing as many people as I can to start using Retroshare as an IM program. It's encryption isn't the best - the NSA might be able to break it with a lot of effort, but they certainly can't do so for mass-surveillance. But it's compact, reliable, cross-platform (Though a rather fiddly compile), and it gets the IMs through. No central servers, all communications encrypted - you establish contacts by exchanging keys. And very hard to filter, as it doesn't run consistent ports and the preferred protocol is SSL with a UDP fallback. It can even do the UDP-dummy-start trick to get through a NAT at both ends, like Skype does. Plus it incorporates folder sharing, which means you can help to promote it by promising friends access to your folder-o-piracy.
Shameless as this plug is, I'm in no way affiliated with Retroshare. I just think it's a very nice piece of software, and more people should use it.
I've already moved to I2P, Tor, and SSH tunnels. That should look suspicious enough.
Fifteen years ago, I'd have been all for causing a disruption. Exercising my self-evident liberties and thwarting The Man, when he came down on me for it.
Now, I have a fucked up back from a car crash, a fucked up knee from wrestling, a mortgage, people depending on me, a professional career, and neighbors. The amount of ways they could absolutely obliterate my life at their slightest whim are uncountable. As much as I'm all about people doing something and not just playing "Reddit-pretend-rebel/protestor", we are beyond the time of, say, the 90s -- where civil disobedience and voicing your dissent or even just being a vocal weirdo just got you either a knock on the door or a two hour trip into and out of your local lockup. We're in a time where you become an instant "child molester" or you just disappear or your finances go all permanently wonky, or you get "investigated" and now your neighbors and employer and coworkers all wonder what you've been up to that has raised the interest of The Man.
The First amendment contains the solution. The problem is that the ones with the hardware are cowards.
The problem is not the TSA or the NSA. The problem is the USA.
I have various acquaintances that have attracted the attention of the regime(s) in the locality where I live (posting AC because of it).
The one anecdote involves a person who, shall we say, has an interest in chemistry and specifically high-speed exothermic reactions. At a stage he was picked up and brought in for questioning - no charges, but the friendly neighborhood popos wanted to know a few things about his and his friends' activities. For a time afterwards he prided himself in telling them all they wanted to hear, nothing of it true.
On another occasion I discussed the concept (feeding of wrong information) with another person who was affiliated with some intelligence organization during a time he spent in the armed forces. He recounted his training, in that "facts" gathered in such a way are always independently corroborated. When information is known to be false, it is still useful to such agencies, as it tells them alot about thought processes etc.
Just saying.
I already send meaningless data each time i make a post in Slashdot like this one..
I am visiting some Brit friends, I'm not associated with their address, or their telephone number, yet a few minutes after visiting they got a call asking for me by name on their landline for a 'survey on my family' I hung up. I then went on to visit family and shortly after arriving they got a survey asking for me by name too on their landline.
Have I done anything wrong that causes me to be tracked? Well I did suggest that GCHQ had gone beyond the law and the chiefs should be prosecuted. An a/c added a death threat to that thread (suggesting William Hague be burned at the stake, a possible GCHQ agent-provocateur, I think it lets them track people in the thread as a terrorist threat, one of their guys adds the threat which they can then claim as a credible threat. And they can then track that 3 deep, to the commenters, their friends and family, i.e. me and the people I visit).
Keep your tinfoil hats on.
So everyone could upload 100 fotos of himself, while looking to face-recognition like 100 different persons.
The traffic doesn't have to be meaningless. Join Freenet or another onion-routing network, and let your traffic be useful!
The only thing that will is for all us basement dwellers to step outside and put our lives on the line. Those in power have too much to loose to give up without a lot of blood being spilled.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Flag all the people not posting suspicious keywords.
I like the professor's idea. However, the problem is after this, there's an increased likelihood that they will deliberately allow the next attack (or even fake one), like many think they did at 9/11.
Watch for 9/11-esque nonsense explanation after the next attack.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-- Dylan Thomas
It was good to see you when you visited, your belief in the upcoming project will put you before others and you will be welcomed into the kingdom. The day is nearly upon us, I have been told that you have everything you need, to bring US to the attention of the world once more. Allah be with you. Ohmar
http://luckyredfish.com
Or more likely, they will be so bombarded with bullshit "civil disobedience" red herrings and won't be able to see the next 9/11 coming, which certain people will perceive as deliberate.
The MAN has won, but its not so bad. The MAN pays well, has full health coverage, and a solid pension plan. Three cheers for the MAN!
http://ia601203.us.archive.org/5/items/milmanual-tm-31-210-improvised-munitions-handbook/tm_31-210_improvised_munitions_handbook.pdf
happy instant woody ;)
so everyone should setup their own Tor exit node?
En what? 9/11 barelly killed half of what diarrhea kill EVERY DAY. Fighting diarrhea is far less costly than fighting this so called terrorism. The real terrorists are these states instilling fear of terrorism in the population. And let me laught when they say that they have so good information about a next terrorist attack that they need to stengthen the security worldwide and not just where the next attack would be. This is probably an attempt to talk about something else than snowden and the surveillance state in the medias...
Come on, do you think for one extended coffee break that the average /.er is going to participate in anything that might threaten his/her comfy little basement or cubicle? We're talking about a group that can't grow the cajones to talk to real girls much less go to war against Big Brother.
http://www.angelfire.com/oh/kewlkewlkewl/cookbook.html
Section IV: Bombs
And that's supposed to help... how? Do you really think the 'watchers' algorithms won't note spastic random shit and disregard it for what it is? It's traffic analysis you're trying to beat, not spam filters. The two are not the same thing, and the former is a much harder job.... especially for amateur kittens who think that by hiding their head, they're hidden - not realizing their ass is hanging out.
Thank ye, kindly. Internet archive is your friend!
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
So you basically consider the existence of diarrhea deaths, for any reason, to be a license for mass murder anywhere in the world? The beautiful part of that is that the same sort of people that engage in terrorism are often the very ones that also block relief efforts and kill relief workers that would work to help reduce or end local problems with disease such as diarrhea deaths. Terrorism isn't "so called," it actually exists and kills tens of thousands of people per year directly, and more indirectly when it blocks humanitarian aid.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Everyone touting how great their encryption methods are. I wonder how do they know they are secure or not? How would you know if the NSA was monitoring you specifically or you are simply too obscure to be noticed? Send a threatening email about a politician or a fake terror plot and see how good your encryption is. Are you willing to bet your ass on it?
Not the original AC, but eliminating the suffering caused by diarrhea would go a long way towards improving quality of life which has been proven to decrease or eliminate mass murder. Decreasing violence overall and allowing more people to work towards peaceful goals like leveling WoW toons.
Fuck you for being an ignorant git and completely glossing over original AC's point with your stupid troll.
-captcha = rhetoric /amen
It's fucking GREAT BRITAIN! The country who was solely responsible for the vast (imagined) liberties for which us American's forefathers fought and died to attain and then protect! (*snicker*)
Seriously though Britain has never really fallen under the whole 'freedom and liberty' thing. They may have some policies which support that, but even with a parliamentary government, their foundation documents are not nearly as liberal as the US ones.
Nothing wrong with that, just might be time for a comprehensive overhaul :)
Fuck you for being an ignorant git and completely glossing over original AC's point with your stupid troll.
I don't think he is ignorant. He probably knows you are right, but prefers to deny the facts in order to promote a police state. That's idiocy, not ignorance.
Jihad!
PRISM NOTE: jk guiz.
I am all about civil disobedience as a nonviolent means of protest, but flooding the systems that are being used to protect against legitimate terror attacks is a woefully bad idea. I think it's better to protest publicly about domestic spying and vote out the assholes that perpetuate a police state. True, we want the unconstitutional actions to stop, but we certainly don't want hats on the ground because we flooded the systems that could have prevented a tragedy. That would send us even deeper into the hole because the asshats would then have ammo to backup their position. Grinding the current system to a halt sounds like a good idea on paper but will only strengthen the resolve of those asshats to make a better, darker system.
If you're going to do that then why not go to a children's burn hospital and start pulling fire alarms. Or start making bomb scares at amputee clinics. Please let's not dress up this professor's idea as "civil disobedience". Civil disobedience would be sit-ins at the NSA or CIA headquarters. What this professor is instead suggesting is a destructive act which could endanger peoples lives by sending out false alarms and distracting law enforcement.
Okay, maybe this is just whooshing over my head, but ... "so the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists"?
But, but, I WANT them to find the "actual terrorists".
I DON'T want them to accuse innocent people of being terrorists. I don't want them to break down doors with guns blazing because someone didn't answer the door fast enough. I don't want them to frighten young children (or adults that have the mental capacity of young children) at airports. I don't want the police to pay a visit to people just because someone Googled "pressure cookers" while his wife Googled "backpacks". I don't want them to arrest people for wearing suspicious T-shirts, or kick people off of airplanes because they are speaking Russian (or Arabic, or Spanish) to each other. I don't want them to shoot to kill because someone dark-skinned is running for the train. I do not want the police to act on false positives.
But I definitely DO want them to catch the "actual terrorists" before they can commit their acts of terrorism!
If so, become a regular visitor to their web site. Buy something from time to time.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Not sure why you guys are calling each other names.
"[E]liminating the suffering caused by diarrhea would go a long way towards improving quality of life which has been proven to decrease or eliminate mass murder." Absolutely right!
But you also can't "consider the existence of diarrhea deaths ... to be a license for mass murder anywhere in the world"!!
And, unfortunately, it's also true that "the same sort of people that engage in terrorism are often the very ones that also block relief efforts and kill relief workers that would work to help reduce or end local problems with disease such as diarrhea deaths."
Two wrongs don't make a right. (Although, as is often pointed out, three lefts do make a right, at least in a city that's laid out in a grid and not with roads following rivers and cow paths, like the one I'm in seems to have been :-) )
Actually, it's the ones too afraid to talk to girls that I'm most scared of. Sooner or later, one of them will decide that after being a virgin for 50 years, he has nothing to live for and will blow himself up and take out a lot of people with him.
He will feel that he's been wronged by society, and maybe he'll decide also that his life was ruined in high school by jocks, so, maybe he'll walk into a crowded gym and blow it up.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
So has Gehan Gunasekara already contacted Equador, Russia, Venuzuela or Cuba for his soon to be needed asylum?
Not going to work - because not enough people will do it. The only way to achieve this creating a worldwide network of Zombie PCs which will run bots to do this.
But I definitely DO want them to catch the "actual terrorists" before they can commit their acts of terrorism!
Here's a better alternative: ask yourself what causes someone to become a terrorist; then ask yourself whether you're doing something in that list; then ask yourself whether those things you're doing are necessary and important enough that it's worth it to have terrorists being formed due to you doing them; then, if the answer is "no", stop doing them. That's a good way to not have terrorists appearing, or at least to not have a majority of them appearing, meaning you won't have to worry about catching that which doesn't exist anymore.
An alternative is to do a cost-benefit analysis. In which position, relative to all other troubles are terrorism-caused violence, destruction and death? 1st place, 2nd, 3rd, 100th, 1000th? Adjust your priorities accordingly. If something kills 'n' more people than terrorists, it should be worth 'n' times more of your time than terrorism. Terrorism kills on average what? A few hundred people every year? There's stuff out there that kill a few hundred thousand people every year. Ask yourself: why aren't you worried a thousand times more about those?
Terrorism is a very minor problem. Giving it all this attention is a cognitive failure. There are much more objectively important issues out there.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
While we're at it, let's start waving fake (but real-looking) automatic weapons in crowded areas, and try to bring fake bombs aboard planes. It'll be hilarious!
Unfortunately for you, they already do all the things you listed everyday for far less reason than preventing terrorism. For example, a few years ago the police in Michigan (IIRC) raided a house looking for a suspect and got the address wrong. They broke down the door and ended up shooting a nine year old girl to death. She was sitting on the couch and freaked out when they busted in. Apparently, nine year old children don't understand the proper cowering procedure expected of citizens when the jack boots smash their way into your home.
So you really want to give them another excuse to continue this abusive and violent behavior all thin the name of "protecting the people?"
Someone mod this up; we don't want to make it harder for real terrorists to be caught - the problem is the use of 'terrorism' as a justification for attacking all sorts of other things (for greed, power and profit)
All your ghosts are just false positives.
So you basically consider the existence of diarrhea deaths, for any reason, to be a license for mass murder anywhere in the world?
It should mean that fighting diarrhea should be about 700 times more important than fighting terrorism, and funded proportionally. It's basic cost-benefit analysis. What will save more lives per dollar invested? Invest the majority of whatever you have on the first spots and you'll be doing more for the wellbeing of the human species than whatever your ancestral hunter-gatherer tribal instincts tell you the order or priorities *should* be. Human instincts are poor policy planners in any context involving more than about 60 to 150 individuals.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I don't want them to frighten young children (or adults that have the mental capacity of young children) at airports.
Why would you want them to frighten anyone? Children are not special snowflakes.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Fair enough. One should use resources efficiently, giving more attention to the ones that are more important. Or, at least, we should be putting our resources into efforts which save the most people per whatever unit you want to measure effort in.
For that matter, as you point out, there are probably more effective ways of fighting terrorism. Helping to ensure that everyone has a future, instead of being driven by desperation to suicidal acts, is probably a very important one.
And there are issues of the methods used -- some methods may cause worse problems than the problems they are trying to solve.
But I still completely disagree that it should be anybody's goal to ensure that "the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists." That was my point.
remove religion and most 'terrorism' will disappear.
we can't do it, of course. we so love our sky daddies, in whatever local mythology forms we were force-fed at a young impressionable age.
but most of us know what is the cause of all the hatred. its god! or, our stupid notions of what a god is.
fix this problem and we fix most of humanity's problems.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
They can't, at least not reliably. As long as we keep saying it's really important to catch criminals before their crimes, we are going to be indirectly telling our government that it's ok to occasionally do all those things that you don't want them to do.
There is a person with nasty intentions and 99 people with average intentions. You can tell them apart one of two ways: 1) wait to see what they do. 2) Be inhumane and un-American to all 100 of them, and then say "at least I think I got the bad guy." And there isn't a third way.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Bull feathers!
The cause of most wars and terrorism is us-versus-them. Different religions provide a dividing line between "us" and "them", but it can just as easily be ethnic origins, skin color, language, political views, gang affiliation, or any other marker.
Precisely!
it actually exists and kills tens of thousands of people per year directly
That's absolutely nothing.
But even so, you still want to sacrifice people's rights (while denying that it's happening, of course) because you're a coward.
As I said above, "some methods may cause worse problems than the problems they are trying to solve."
remove religion and most 'terrorism' will disappear.
Nope. If you said "remove political ideologies" I'd tend to agree. There is no strong correlation between (ir)religion and terrorism/non-terrorism, but there is such a strong correlation between (a)politics and terrorism/non-terrorism. Both "politics plus religion" and "politics minus religion" can develop into terrorism. Weren't it so and atheist movements such as the French Revolution and Communism would not have developed terrorist activities. On the other hand neither "non-politics plus religion" nor "non-politics minus religion" ever develop into it.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
But I still completely disagree that it should be anybody's goal to ensure that "the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists."
The problem is that someone's an actual terrorist only after actually committing some terrorist activity or at least helping someone who did. Trying to go after people who are "thinking about" committing an act of terrorism is going after someone for a thought crime. No, the appropriate approach is to focus on prevention. You try the best you can, upper bound by an objective cost-benefit analysis, to prevent such acts from being successful. And if it so happens that one such act goes through the prevention efforts and end up happening, then you go after those who *now* have actually become criminals to prosecute and punish them to the full extent of their *actual* crime.
There's no place in a free society for thought crimes. Widespread surveillance is unneeded both in principle and in practice.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Indeed. Do this, and the next time a real terrorist gets through then kiss even more of your rights goodbye.
Certainly one shouldn't be afraid to fight against surveillance etc. You also shouldn't be afraid to buy a home cooking device etc if you need one, but deliberately buying a pressure cooker and a package of ball bearings just to "add noise" is just plain stupid.
You've overlooked the fact that in many places various local guerillas, terrorists, and warlords are likely to kill or drive off the aid workers trying to solve the diarrhea problem, not the mention the various other diseases and community problems they could address. Your unwillingness to acknowledge and address the second problem (lawlessness) means that the first problem (diarrhea) won't get solved either. So, diarrhea will continue. It's not cost effective to send aid workers when they will die and can't deliver the aid. Sometimes policy planning goes very badly when it overlooks questions like the security of the workers enacting the policy.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Okay, maybe this is just whooshing over my head, but ... "so the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists"?
But, but, I WANT them to find the "actual terrorists".
I think the point is that they're using unacceptable methods to hunt for the actual terrorists which infringe on our rights. By making those unacceptable methods worthless, you remove the government's motivation in using them.
It's a fine idea, but I think what will actually happen is that the government will have no problem at all locking up everyone who tries that approach. I recommend instead that we stop fucking voting for any politicians that aren't doing anything to stop this. In the absence of candidates which agree with us on this issue, at least vote the incumbent out to send a message that you get a one-term max unless you respect our rights. That requires people to actually give a shit, but civil disobedience wouldn't work unless enough people give a shit anyway.
What about the right to life for the people being killed? You claim to be concerned about people's rights, but not theirs. The right to life if the most fundamental right and you seem to have no problem in it being violated.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
LOL... diarrhea
ask yourself whether those things you're doing are necessary and important enough that it's worth it to have terrorists being formed due to you doing them; then, if the answer is "no", stop doing them.
I can just hear them cry now, "But if I stop doing that, the not-yet-terrorists will win!!!" Some people would rather destroy the prize then let anyone else win it.
Considering that US is ignoring our intellectual property (what we read could be privacy, but what we write is intellectual property, and seems that part of this is to gather intellectual property for some corporations), just ignore/deny/don't enforce US intellectual property (or at least, choose when you want to honor it and when not). Is doing exactly what they are doing, after all.
When the corporations that pays most of their personal income starts to complain, they could review their policies. This is not about security, is, and always was, about money.
Indeed. Contrary to the opinions of some politicians, terrorists generally don't "hate our freedom." That's not to say they're all acting rationally or anything, it's just that oversimplifying problems stops us from solving them.
Need Internet Archive over HTTPS. (Oh wait... all our keys are belong to them.)
Well, the more false positives there are, the angrier Americans will collectively get until we rise up and bring an end to these shenanigans. I could care less about foreign terrorists when we are being terrorized by our own government.
What about the right to life for the people being killed?
They may have such a right, but who is violating it? Not the government. I do not for a second believe the government should violate people's rights to stop the bogeymen. Your statement has no place here because it is not the government violating people's "right to life," but an extremely minuscule band of terrorist bogeymen.
You claim to be concerned about people's rights, but not theirs.
Clearly you don't understand the situation. Him being against the government violating people's rights to save people != supporting terrorists who kill people. I don't know how you think up this nonsense.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The right to life if the most fundamental right
Being alive would mean little if you didn't have any of the other rights. I don't want any of your security theater if it means we have to violate rights to get it (and we do).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The surveillance is not for terrorists; terrorists learned long ago not to use electronic comms. Even as far back as 9/11, the bad guys did not use cell phones or email. No, the surveillance is not for terrorist, it is for us. They are searching for other issues such as threats to Wall Street, or copy write infringements, etc., i.e. threats to their money and power. That is where you should flood the airwaves...
This will never work because it assumes that the purpose of the surveillance state is to 'fight terrorism'.
This is incorrect. The purpose of the surveillance state is to consolidate power in the hands of the elite. The target isn't terrorists using keywords like 'bomb' etc. The targets are everyone, using whatever words they use and doing whatever they do in their normal life.
The real intention is to give those at the top, unlimited, total information surveillance powers against their enemies, WHOMEVER they may be at any time. You want that supreme court decision to go your way? Read the private email and listen to the private conversations of the swing justice to gain insight to his thinking and shape your arguments correctly. If that fails, use the information to blackmail him.
You want to influence the elections? Analyze the big-data you have on the entire population in the voting district to figure out their private thoughts on issues and advertise accordingly.
You want to start a war? Use the knowledge you have to leverage the actors you have creating mainstream news to shape the country's views.
There were already laws against bombing or shooting people. The terrorism is the slight of hand that allows you to target people who have not committed crimes.
Liberty.
Bogeymen don't have body counts, terrorists do. I agree that government shouldn't violate people's rights to stop imaginary bogeymen. I do think the government should take positive steps to stop terrorists from violating the rights of its citizens, such as when the terrorists kill or kidnap them. The right to life doesn't stop with the government.
As to whom it is that doesn't understand, I think that is you. Many people on Slashdot, and wider society, oppose even surveillance of people in direct communication with al Qaida for the purpose of planning and conducting terrorist attacks. They want to pretend that it is all a pretense for the intelligence agencies to spy on and suppress domestic political groups. Some narcissists are opposed to any surveillance at all more or less on the grounds that if it exists it could target them for some reason never explained. Some people appear to even be trying to establish a positive right for terrorists in communication with terrorist groups to occur and be protected. People are actually trying to create more rights to shield terrorists engaged in terrorism. That can't end well, and many people are indifferent (cough) to the outcome. They probably shouldn't be. Few populations that have effective access to the political process, as do people in most of the West, react well to regular incidents of mass slaughter. If you dislike the current situation I have little doubt you will like it even less if the terrorists are able to gain a foothold and begin an effective campaign of mass murder. The voters won't stand for it, and every law, including written Constitutions and unwritten, are subject to change with enough support from the population.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
In place of security theater you offer civil rights theater. You make extravagant claims of rights being lost that aren't supported by fact. Please, list the rights that you think have actually been lost. Will voting be on the list? Worship? Free speech?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Bogeymen don't have body counts, terrorists do.
Many terrorists are bogeymen in the sense that there aren't nearly as many of them as some people would have us believe.
I do think the government should take positive steps to stop terrorists from violating the rights of its citizens
To me, "positive steps" are steps that don't involve the government violating people's rights to stop a threat, real or not.
The right to life doesn't stop with the government.
No, it doesn't, but government thugs can't violate people's other rights just because certain people are killing others.
People are actually trying to create more rights to shield terrorists engaged in terrorism.
I think they're just trying to stop innocents from being affected by surveillance and such. We're supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, not the land of the cowards who sacrifice their principles for safety.
The voters won't stand for it, and every law, including written Constitutions and unwritten
Voters don't have absolute power.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
In place of security theater you offer civil rights theater.
I offer no such thing.
Please, list the rights that you think have actually been lost.
And you'll do what, engage in newspeak in an effort to pretend as if it isn't happening?
The TSA is harassing people at airports. The government is collecting information on innocent people en masse and saying it's okay because a certain court rubberstamped the vague, unspecific warrants they brought to it. The government sometimes shoves people off to free speech zones. People near the border are constantly harassed. You may not recognize that some rights are being violated, but I certainly do, and no judge can tell me otherwise.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
That's right. We have to stand against those who think in this dualistic way. There are two kinds of people: Those who think of themselves as belonging in one of two mutually exclusive categories, and those who don't...
I always liked this concept. Make your life an open book. What do you really have to hide, anyway? Flood the Internet with the mundane heap of boredom that is your real life and the poor clowns they have manning the filters will have nothing to do with you.
Of course, I recently heard about a motorist being pulled over by the Man for something called "conspicuous adherence to the law," meaning the person they wanted to stop didn't cooperate by breaking any laws, and so that made the person suspicious. Natch.
These regimes aren't prevented by protest, they're thrown off by their victims, typically by violence, less frequently through economic means. It's going to have to get a lot worse from a privacy perspective in this country before it gets better, at all. Roughly half the population is all for controlling the other half.
Yes, but most people who wind up shitting themselves to death are poor and brown and in another country somewhere, so they only count for about 1/1000th to 1/10,000th of a 'real' person (that is, a white US citizen.)
...but not infinitely strong, and a sufficient number of individuals can overwhelm him and cause him to waste his strength meaninglessly.
As a pretend Political Officer, I had to come up with a bunch of meaningless (but familiar sounding) political sayings for a POW training exercise once.
"The People Know Best, And I Speak For The People" was a good one .. especially when I forced the poor long-suffering POWs to try to explain its meaning.
Some of my fellow NCOs were looking at me a bit oddly for a while, until they finally got the point.
"Humility Is A Smile In The Eye Of Your Mother" was another favorite :-)
So you'd better be careful, look closely at how this could all be presented by a prosecutor .. or the first few hundred trying this convincingly enough may get a wee bit more attention than they expected. Kind of like the first few ranks in the protest march .. encountering .50 cal's in The Man's anti-riot barricades.
Of course they say the weather at Gitmo isn't so bad in the winter months.
I dunno about this...the internet/web is already saturated with viagra and nigerian emails along with countless mega-reams of other traffic...i may be wrong and naive but this seems like it would only contribute to that issue...overload the internet to fight surveillence and it may slow to a crawl(?)
Any heads-up on this matter would be appreciated
Looking at terrorism from a somewhat open source perspective, you start with extremist ideology. In the case of Al Qaeda, this would be that Islam is being persecuted by non-muslims, so go forth and destroy non-muslims. The project maintainers would be the people spouting this ideology, so the contributors can go forth and blow themselves and unbelievers up in Jihad!
If you wanted to stop terrorism, you'd be best off undermining the ideology. Attacking anything below that is just justifying the ideology.
Perhaps one way to undermine the ideology would be to do something like Ajahn Brahm says:
I'm Buddhist...and I'm a Christian...and I'm a Muslim...
If the ideology doesn't allow them to attack fellow muslims, they no longer have justification for their actions.
Any other ideas?
>>> rrorism is a very minor problem.
The govenrments know this much.
>>> Giving it all this attention is a cognitive failure.
The govenrments know exactly what they are doing. They need ultimate control and they are doing all these things to gain that. Not realizing these simple truths behind all this apparent "fool hardy" is peoples' cognitive failure.
It's not cost effective to send aid workers when they will die and can't deliver the aid.
There are two not mutually exclusive solutions to this: to make deals with the local guerillas and warlords (I fail to see how "terrorists" would form a distinct category from those) and to pay bodyguards subcontracted from them to protect the aid workers, since those are the law over their respective territories. As for places in an active state of war the best approach is to not enter them until said war is over so as to not create terrorists (this time actually so) focused on you rather than on whatever their original enemies are (unless, of course, there are absolutely overwhelming human rights violations such as genocide at play, since those evidently overcome any such consideration).
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
They can't, at least not reliably. As long as we keep saying it's really important to catch criminals before their crimes, we are going to be indirectly telling our government that it's ok to occasionally do all those things that you don't want them to do.
There is a person with nasty intentions and 99 people with average intentions. You can tell them apart one of two ways: 1) wait to see what they do. 2) Be inhumane and un-American to all 100 of them, and then say "at least I think I got the bad guy." And there isn't a third way.
This person gets it. Part of the price of living in a free society is occasional acts of terrorism and mass shootings. The alternative is that we all become imprisoned by the removal of our freedoms, and then the "terrorists win" anyway. Law enforcement is fine but the current situation is going too far.
This is exactly right...
In no particular order (excep the last entry), things that are likely to kill:
*Alcohol related deaths
*Cancer
*Car crashes
*Accidental drowning
*Drug abuse
*AIDS/HIV
*Terrorism
Terrorism is a means to an end.. a means for the government to control the population
Perhaps this thread should have the Guy Fawkes Mask Icon instead of a padlock.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
It's amazing to me that so many people are worried about government snooping of their phone calls and emails. Everyone with half a brain has known about this since George Bush gained office through the Supreme Court and not by popular vote. All this aside, think for a moment........who is it that knows everything about you? Your likes and dislikes, your passions and fetishes, or, what you had for dinner! It's the corporations!!! They have been silently collecting information about you for years and no one seems to care. They are watching you, they are tracking you. In stores, online, and everywhere else. Americans think they are secure in their privacy, but, SUPPRISE!, you are not. The corporations know much more about you than the government. Just what do you think they are doing with this information? Besides targeting you to increase sales, they are probably in bed with the NSA and countless other organizations, sharing all that juicy info they are collecting on you. Even this post on Slashdot is probably going to end up in some corporate database to be shared with all the intelligence organizations who may be interested. As for me, I say; come and get me you assholes. As an old Marine vet, I just may meet you at the door with a 44 Magnum which even your bullet proof vests won't protect you from. Wake up Slashdotters! Corporate America and Corporate World are watching everything you do!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
A hammer + explosives, what could possibly go wrong?