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3 Reasons To Hate Mass Surveillance; 3 Ways To Fight It
This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.)
THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE:
1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.
2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.
Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.
3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?
THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:
The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:
1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.
2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)
3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.
Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.
1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.
2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.
Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.
3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?
THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:
The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:
1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.
2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)
3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.
Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.
I'm running the firefox plugin TrackMeNot which periodically runs random google queries with keywords like: "building bombs", "terrorist attacks", "nitroglycerine" ...
certain groups which are used to be under constant surveillance are going to become the future's subject matter experts on the subject.
Why does no one mention TIA while discussing this?
Hasn't this been going on for a long time and why is it a surprise now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
coming forth to scary us home; dark matters IV the neverending holycost; beware falling gargoyles; http://www.globalresearch.ca/weather-warfare-beware-the-us-military-s-experiments-with-climatic-warfare/7561
And develop a long term strategy to put crypto in all comms - e.g. use response headers from servers to push requests over to https where they are supported. Better yet produce an https+ which allows sites to use unsigned keys, CA signed keys, or even web of trust signed keys and present that info to the user in a meaningful way. Get rid of the CA tax and there would be far less reason for sites to use plain http any more.
This just isn't news for the folks who read here regularly.
Reaching Joe Six Pack is what this comes down to, and the cynic in me says that ship has already sailed.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The problem with blanket surveillance is it encourages a wide range of people to look for ways round it - which later can be used by "the usual suspects" to cover up their drug trafficking, terrorism, and pedophile rape gangs. We would be much better off just monitoring the undesirables
The best you can hope for is more secretive mass surveillance and more limited internal access. If every country is also aiming to mass surveillance, any country that doesn't will be left behind.
So, clicking on that 'learn more' link at the top of the page puts Trend Micro into an uproar that "yourbrowser.net" is:
Details: Verified fraud page or threat source
Suspected fraud page or threat source
Associated with spam or possibly compromised
Rating in progress. Trend Micro Web Reputation is currently set to block pages that have not been checked for safety.
Irony, or on purpose?
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Finally!
Slashdot users pretend to wage an anti-beta protest, and in turn, timothy of slashdot calls for an anti-spook struggle. Bullshit revolutions all around.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Yes, how horrible it would be if some country was left behind and didn't violate the rights of its citizens in the same way as the other countries! Get with the times, guys!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yeah the U.S. is relatively benign right now, butt, let the economy go south and see if they are so friendly and honorable. it's clear to all but the blind, deaf, and comatose that the State is hardening their facilities and forces...WITH OUR MONEY!!! Gird Nerds, the ride is just beginning.
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
It will get me on the naughty list, but that's a price I'll pay gladly. That's all for now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It would be nice is Slashdot were doing more than just posting a story. It's not like it would be hard to add for a day... TDWFB Banner
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Mass surveillance is inevitable to any industrialized country. Which is why all countries with any technological sophistication have it. To think that one can "fight" it to any real degree is like thinking one can "fight" indoor plumbing or mass electrification.
Information overload actually makes it easy for the clever people to slip through the cracks unobserved.
Really?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
There are real threats at both extremes: there are real terrorists using computers, the internet and cell phones to organize deadly attacks against the U.S. and Europe. There have also been presidents who have used the power of the intelligence agencies at their disposal to spy on political rivals, activists, journalists and civil rights leaders. The goal has to be some kind of middle ground. For the anti-surveillance advocates who are enjoying the rise of their viewpoint in the polls, consider this: a single terrorist attack on U.S. soil could easily tilt the polls the other way and land us in a worse surveillance state than we have now. Be careful what you ask for.
Inside the U.S., the middle ground for me is real-time judicial oversight, checks and balances, and warrants for particular things about particular people. That is, not blanket domestic surveillance. Not of phone calls, nor financial records, nor medical records, nor library records, nor emails, etc. I see the benefit of speedy access to this data, but if that necessitates the government holding vast troves of rather personal data about all its citizens, then I think the potential for abuse is too high and not worth the benefit. That's my personal liberty-security fulcrum.
I can't even successfully troll non-anonymously on slashdot now. Where did everybody go???
February 11th, 2014 is The Day We Fight Back against Mass Surveillance http://www.naaij.org/2014/02/1... Over 100k signatures now!
nigelt.wordpress.com
If capitalism worked, we'd see a country spring up and declare that it will NOT spy on its citizens and people with some brain would flock there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm very surprised to see that the article and all posts fail to mention TOR.
TOR may not be perfect, but it's a lot better than any readily available alternative. I'd suggest using it for any browsing you think might be the least bit controversial. The more people that use TOR, the better it works. It's a bit slow, but it's livable.
http://www.torproject.org/
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
"Mass surveillance is inevitable to any industrialized country. Which is why all countries with any technological sophistication have it. To think that one can 'fight' it to any real degree is like thinking one can 'fight' indoor plumbing or mass electrification."
Sad, but true. Still, political plays a role in the outcome of all this in terms of what sort of world we want to build together.
Recent posts by me to slashdot on that referencing other items:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
The bottom line -- read David Brin's "Transparent Society", read Theodore Sturgeon's 1952 "The Skills of Xanadu" about the meaning of privacy in a mobile networked world, read James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" and think about how we can transcend our society to some new healthier form. There are links to all those in my previous posts. It is so sad that with all this mindbogglingly powerful technology the main use we can think for it at first is to create artificial scarcity and kill each other with it. So sad. That is ultimately a moral issue requiring new ways of thinking, like Albert Einstein suggested after the development of atomic technology:
http://www.anwot.org/
We need to accept we have powerful technologies relative to classical human needs and rethink fundamental issues of our society accordingly, such as moving beyond artificial scarcity and moving towards a basic level of abundance for all (which would include more time for voluntary civic participation instead of endless overwork at mostly pointless activities related to preserving a scarcity-based status quo).
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
Some humor by me on is at the end of this post, a parody of the "bunker scene", where this time Hitler confronts post-scarcity ideas:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
Any movement that relies on secrecy to succeed is pretty much a non-starter, even in times of less technology like the 1950s Civil Rights movement. The push for encryption against the government by technologists is similar to the argument that handguns will somehow stop government corruption or fascism. It is not going to work. What will work is broad social change done through democratic processes.
"What Social Science Can Tell Us About Social Change"
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
Or as I've said before: "As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go r
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Writing your congresscritter is a good idea, but if writing Congress about NSA abuses counts as fighting back, then you might as well call this The Day We Surrender.
NSA abuses are not the real problem. NSA is just one of many potential adversaries, and if the capability of abuse exists, then you have a problem whether or not you happen to know who is taking advantage of it. If Congress makes NSA stop doing this shit but FSB can still do it, then you haven't really solved anything, have you? Politely asking one party to stop == burying your head in the sand.
If Congress has a role to play here, it would be that all government-created barriers to secure standards should be removed (e.g. repeal CALEA and even reverse it: outlaw easily-added taps) and government purchasing standards could be modernized, thereby maybe helping to create economy of scale. e.g. If a Department of Labor middle manager talks to his underling about work-related matter but isn't using OTP (in spite of the fact that they physically meet regularly) that's a problem; whereas if the spec is that the no-more-than-$300 machines have to OTP exchange whenever their users are near each other, then a year later we'll have this over-century-old crypto tech in our $150 phones.
As for HTTPS Everywhere, HTTPS is nice 1980s (pre-PGP trust model) PK tech, and a step up from what most of us are using most of the time, but please, be realistic about such anachronisms, especially if you want it to be transparent/automatic instead of obsessively checking certs all the time. You can't have .. (let's see, fairly-stock Ubuntu 12.04 system here) ..
/etc/ssl/certs/*.pem | wc
.. a hundred and fifty seven fully-trusted key introducers, none of whom you have ever met or know anything about. It's not useless, but it's next-to-useless for common users being protected from government-magnitude surveillance powers.
# ls -l
157 1719 25702
I think Slashdot had The Day We Fight Back against the forced-rollout beta.
As far as security goes I would not be shocked if more intense spying is not applied to individuals who take precautions against being spied upon. Look at it from a law enforcement view or national security point of view. We can name one fellow Joe and another fellow Sam for purposes of demonstration. Suppose Joe is seen to use strong encryption, avoids using smart phones or cell phones, pays cash always and quietly rents a room from a private home owner. That alone may send out signals that Joe needs a hard look. Sam on the other hand is welded to his smart phone, never even uses a password and is wide open to scrutiny in every area of his life. Guess which one will attract interest. Sam's flaws are known. Sam's negatives match the negatives of almost all people in the area. Joe, conversely, seems to have no flaws and no real data points in the system. Any smart agent or cop will want to find ways to define Joe and frankly it won't take much effort at all. In the past very unlikely people were employed as agents. A man might make progress with a very pretty, very pretty, young girl who he would never suspect is employed by the police department as a professional spy. But these days tiny cams and recording devices are rather easy to insert into a suspicious person's environment. I have seen this stuff in action and knew a young girl who worked in a spy like capacity for the cops. She was inserted in a community and under the age of twenty and played the role of a hippie like youth in rebellion which in fact she sort of was. But her pay check was through her spying efforts.
I thought that was the idea; Make 'em track my every move, since I'm doing fuck all to actually fight the bastards.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
HTTPS errywhere!
Now the NSA will know you went barelylegaltranssexualmidgetspeeingondudes.com, but not which barely legal transsexual midget peeing on a dude you got your rocks off to.
Wow. Much improvement. Such secure.
TRUSTe = InQtel = CIA ... or so rumor has it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In 2002, Wired Magazine questioned whether TrustE could be trusted, noting that rather than revoking privacy seals for violations, "Truste officials often seemed to be covering for their clients".[23]
In 2008, a Galexia Consulting study reported that TrustE had terminated only one customer for non-compliance in the previous eleven years, despite a number of significant privacy violations which had received press coverage. "The most significant criticism of trustmarks is that in practice they have proved to be virtually worthless in the face of major privacy breaches. Their privacy standards are low to begin with, but even these rules are simply not enforced against large, paying members."[24]
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Figure out what can alert the watchers without getting into trouble, and compare notes and discuss in forums on Tinternet.
Make sport out of the watchers by seeing what you can figure out about them simply by provoking unnecessary reactions.
Read The Art of War and study Tai Chi (properly, not just as a spaced-out eastern arm-waving exercise, but as the study of super-efficient movement and coordination -- though that can take a decade or so just to get the basics half-right).
John_Chalisque
The thing you civilians don't get is we backdoored the basic encryption protocols a long long time ago.
And, as you're now finding out, we have been watching.
There are five NSA sites in North America, btw. Not two.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Fight back against mass surveillance? How about you start by not promoting some of the biggest perpetrators in Google, Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, you have to give this random website your e-mail, your country of residence and your name for central storing! Is this irony, or is my understanding of the word not correct?
This is like atheism trying to organize itself against religion by adopting the same principles.
I feel that these three reasons are rather weak.
I'm not sure how #1 is a reason. The pervasiveness of the internet is not in itself a problem, any more than air being everywhere is a problem. Show me how the pervasiveness is an issue.
# 2 is weak; it talks about what could happen, rather than what is likely to happen. I understand that when arguing against something, if the outcome of letting that thing happen is catastrophic, that will determine how convincing the argument is, but I prefer to look at the probability of the outcome occuring, and I would like to see more evidential arguments for more privacy.
#3 is just vague. You can't say that I'm paying for privacy and then not even be specific about it. Why should I care if I decide that the amount I'm paying is minuscule?
Deal with reality - the world as it is - rather than ideality - the world as you would like it to be.
Sometimes I think these round table groups get together and break open Orwell, Huxley,
and others and use them like a operating manual on how to puppeteer the governments.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
If (x)-ism worked we'd see....etc etc....
The fact is the plutocrats, oligarches, kleptocrats, and other parasites and looters
always worm their way into any government and subvert it and compromise
the people and the process.
This has been a generational thing where the families pass on these tricks
to their offspring, and they are societal leeches that bleed the workign class dry
over and over for centuries.
Google the term "Robber Baron", and you get an idea of whom I am speaking.
In the realm of political piracy there is truly nothing new under the sun.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
only traitors use wget
I have it running too, but I'm not a terrorist and I generate a lot of internet traffic. Let them store and analyze it all, it will waste a lot of resources
"What will work is broad social change done through democratic processes."
Watch the film "Hacking Democracy" and then tell me how its going to work.
Democracy is an illusion in most of the nations of the world.
Its there to give ppl the illusion of choice, you have no choice, you have owners. ~ George Carlin.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Bitcoin transaction (a.k.a. "the block chain") are public record by design. They don't state people's names, just addresses, but given current levels of "metadata" gathered, addresses can be matched to physical people relatively easily. The myth of Bitcoin anonymity is just that - a myth.
The plutocrats, oligarchs, and kleptocrats are shaking in their boots because you
gave them a list of names that are their enemies, roflmao.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
This is why I ==don't=== believe Google, Yahoo, and the others when they say there not willfully aiding the government in spying.
The PR rep from these companies about these FISA letters, and being more transparent to the public is a smoke screen. Trying to separate themselves from the distrust Uncle Sam has been dealing with.
I think people should stop it with the one sided attack of politicians and government (the EFF comes to mind) and start publicly attacking and distrusting the very companies which seem to just as bad and corrupt as Uncle Sam.
And on levels. At least 10 levels, from small thieves to international terrorist.
If you mass spy, people will eventually come aware and counteract. This is BAD for the society because 1. Trust goes down and 2. Gives incentive to all criminals to get more involved in counterintelligence. BAD BAD BAD.
However, if you do surgical, targeted intelligence strikes and keep everything low profile, you're better off as a goverment. If you want to spy everyone, you're just destroying the whole society.
It's like nuking a whole country because there are some bad guys you know and some which you don't know but want to find out who they are. I think you're better off with a special operations team.
Anyway, society adjusts itself, we'll find new ways to protect our liberties, having equilibrium for a while and meanwhile they'll develop even powerful means to spy. Making us find new ways too...
Just tripped over this -- scroll down past the initial paperwork. You may recognise the site.
http://www.theblackvault.com/d...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Do you have jobs?