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RMS: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?
Covalent writes "RMS describes how much surveillance is too much (hint: it's all too much) and how to combat, circumvent, and prevent future surveillance. How much of what is suggested is plausible? How much is just a pipe dream? Discuss!"
The article contains an extensive list of things we do that give too much data to centralized organization, and offers solutions to combat all of them. From the article: "The goal of making journalism and democracy safe therefore requires that we reduce the data collected about people by any organization, not just by the state. We must redesign digital systems so that they do not accumulate data about their users. If they need digital data about our transactions, they should not be allowed to keep them more than a short time beyond what is inherently necessary for their dealings with us."
After more than a decade of the "war on terror" and its massive abuses, it's safe to say there is no democracy left to be withstanding anything.
It's too bad that the eminently sensible advice in that opinion piece will be ignored by techies because it comes from a guy perceived as icky.
It's too bad that anyone who takes that advice seriously and wants to act on it, then seeks out RMS for help, will likely be repulsed at some point.
In times of upheaval, ideologues are often the only people thinking straight enough to find a way out. Why did ours have to come wrapped in this particular package, a marketing nightmare that makes selling good sense so difficult even within the tech community?
I despair for the future and this is but one reason among legions.
I'm a lot more worried about the US's homegrown religious fundamentalists than I could ever be of the middle-eastern ones that you seem to fear so much.
For starters, there's a whole lot more of them. Most are not individually dangerous, but they are collectively doing a lot more long-term damage.
Destructive technology already existed in Jefferson's time (and besides, it was Benjamin Franklin who said it, almost twenty years before the United States of America declared its independence), and religious fundamentalists have existed since the dawn of religion.
As I see it, the biggest problem is that no matter how soft and simple lawmakers make it for the government to pursue avenues of investigation with legal checks-and-balances (ie, FISA court) those investigating are unwilling to follow those rules. It doesn't matter that FISA laws have provisions that allow investigators to follow phone or data traces or call routing and still obtain a legal warrant after the fact if they never bother to get that warrant, let alone get them in advance.
Blanket surveillance of everyone seems to me to violate rules that are supposed to guarantee people rights to privacy in their persons, papers, and effects without due-process. I am not a judge, but if I were, I'd interpret that to mean that the government isn't allowed to maintain anything more than basic vital records or basic direct-interaction records with people unless there's a reason. Investigating crime is a reason, but simply having a huge database to analyze after-the-fact is not.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
RMSDS
RMS Derangement Syndrome
Amongst other things, those who wait for any RMS story on Slashdot and pepper it with sockpuppet or anonymous posts attacking RMS in any way possible. Note the first two posts are like this.
Whoever you are, I hope this vitriol of yours doesn't bleed onto other people in real life. You do realize you have a personality disorder, I hope. There's nothing wrong with having such a disorder, it's accepting it and then getting help for it that shows the good person you really are inside.
In the meantime, please leave RMS and the rest of Slashdot readers alone. You'll never, ever be able to take away from him and us all the vast success of the FOSS/GNU movement, the fruits of which you undoubtably depend on every day, no matter what you say or do. You obviously know this, so please try and break the cycle and try to be a better person. Talk to someone about it, go and try to get some help, please.
If GMail says to me "You get free mail, in exchange we parse all your email to display you an advert" then I'm happy to lose that bit of my privacy - and with this knowledge in mind I won't use GMail for anything important.
The public cares, the problem comes when you think your communication is private, but it is actually being intercepted and stored by the US Government. Why does the US Government feel they are so special? I'd like to see the response if another government asked some of these providers to access their entire database.
Last I checked, Democracy is what gave us the Surveillance State.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
It's not exactly an accident that the NSA legitimized their mass surveillance through the PATRIOT act.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Although I can empathize with your cynicism, defeatism takes you nowhere. Some people do care, and other people have much lower thresholds to begin caring than you give them credit too.
Eventually at some threshold everybody will care. We are just not there yet, fortunately.
FTFY.
limits surveillance of US civilians by our government.
It shouldn't just be US citizens, but innocent people in general.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
This. It is not about everything being private all the time. It is about choosing who sees what. Corporations should be required to disclose disclosures of my information, and the government should have no ability to circumvent that without a warrant. I have no problem with the plumber coming into my house while I am at work. I do have a problem if said plumber is forced to allow the police in at the same time.
Tor (and Tor hidden services) can no longer be considered completely secure. It's much better than nothing, but if you become a target, the NSA and other government agencies can and have used methods to track people down who use Tor. The FBI has shown that they are willing to actively attack the Tor network by infecting innocent bystanders with malware. The NSA are making a big push on the Tor network, as revealed by recently released Snowden files. We need to rapidly develop and migrate to a new generation of anonymizing networks.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
And here I thought we already had one of those. Are you're saying this one was way too unclear and wordy?
The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. It was adopted in response to the abuse of the writ of assistance, a type of general search warrant issued by the British government and a major source of tension in pre-Revolutionary America. The Fourth Amendment was introduced in Congress in 1789 by James Madison, along with the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, in response to Anti-Federalist objections to the new Constitution. Congress submitted the amendment to the states on September 28, 1789. By December 15, 1791, the necessary three-quarters of the states had ratified it. On March 1, 1792, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson announced the adoption of the amendment.
And that's the problem. As long as we keep playing word games with what the Constitution says, it doesn't matter how explicit the guarantee is. Somebody will find a way around it. It's been happening for more than 200 years. How much more explicit can you be than, for example, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preamble that points out the reason: the people should be able to raise militias for the security of a free state. But that doesn't remotely limit the language that follows it. If anything, that makes "assault weapons" bans even more unconstitutional.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Yes, I plead guilty of hyperbole.
However "The absolute worst you can claim about American religious fundamentalitists, as far as terrorism goes" is where we diverge.
You're looking for terrorists. I'm looking at people who fundamentally threaten the next generations by undercutting education, libraries, women's rights, and critical research that the US could be at the forefront of (instead of letting other countries pass us by).
I haven't even mentioned their indirect influence on people who start wars, and their direct influence on causing major unrest and hate against the western world (Quran-burning, anyone?)
The most damage the foreign terrorists have done to the Western world is to turn us against ourselves, while they pop some corn over the fires set by our drones, and watch our "civilized and democratic" model being consumed by corporatism and paranoia, under the illusion of fighting to preserve our unsustainable way of life.
We are our own worst enemies.
In this instance, for the first time in many years, I agree with RMS. I now believe companies should retain the minimum possible data about customers, and lets solve the usability problems that come from that separately.
Don't like to re-enter your credit card and shipping info every time you buy from Amazon? It's just not that hard to solve that problem without Amazon keeping your data.
Recommendation engines? It's just not that hard to solve the problem of finding other products like this one without keeping customer data (remember when Netflix and Amazon had "lists" where customers would volunteer to group like items together - that was great!).
Targeted advertisement? Does anything think that has worked out well, rather than just being creepy and still failing to get the "time" aspect of targeting right?
Sure, I can accept that there is still info that a company needs to accumulate to do business well, especially for subscription-based businesses, but just like we now code with "least privilege" in mind, can we not also code with "least customer data" in mind?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"We fought for Freedom, and all we got was democracy." - Pieter-Dirk Uys, South African satirist
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I'll never understand the hate for RMS entirely. As far as I've seen in several videos and interviews he actually seems fairly level headed. He seems to understand very well that what he chooses to do is his own personal belief. He thinks that belief adopted by others would be better for those individuals, but he's not trying to cram it down anyone's throat. At least I personally, after watching a few hours worth of his videos feel that way.
He definitely is a bit pretentious ("I wouldn't even accept an iBad as a present"), but the guy graduated magna cum laude at Harvard, and then went to MIT (to not finish his degree.) It would be hard not to be a little pretentious, and have more than a bit of an ego.
At least he's not Torvalds.
Engaging in historical revisionism to try and change how things were to how they think things should have been. Biasing it to twist the philosophies of historical figures and to retroactively smear the reputations of people they consider their enemies. And then try to push that shit on students all over the country by abusing their position.
They do nonsensical shit like try to put creationism into science classes, where it doesn't belong at all.
Except you give them too much credit. That's not what they're on about - they aren't capable of challenging things like evolutionary theory. They're all about letting teachers push their religion and allowing students to ignore science in favor of whatever they've been indoctrinated with by their parents.
Not to mention that our Fundamentalists also push crap like Quiverfull (breeding a Christian Army), Oathkeepers, and the Christian Dominionists who see the Federal government as their enemy and a barrier to their control. The only difference between our fundamentalists and theirs is they just haven't started shooting yet.