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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.