Excuse me, but that sounds a trite paternalistic. We don't kill socieities. We offer options, we offer alternatives, and (most heinous of all) we offer an example. If the West is culturally overwhelming the rest of the world, well, they're buying the crap. They're making a choice.
To say that we should somehow censor ourselves and not "inflict" the spread of Western values (both noble and base), is yet again to set the West up as the arbiter of what is good and true for all. Oh, no, you can't have blue jeans... you're not ready for them yet.
I really don't see how that attitude would be any improvement. Currently, at least it's a choice being made.
An application ment to destroy or delete my computer data is the same as a person taking tossing a brick into my window.
Um, if someone throws a brick through your window, it's not terrorism. It's vandalism. Let's not debase the language just because it's fashionable. And there's the rub: People want to call everything "terrorism" because they know the public will accept (right now) almost anything in the name of a crusade against terrorism.
Nazist germany didn't need cameras to control their populace, only allies with guns and airplanes kicked them out, USSR didn't need no cameras, it rotted from the top.
Right. Surveillance by unaccountable secret police played no role in either Nazi Germany or the USSR. The weather must be nice on your planet.
Those two countries are prime examples of what can happen when the principle of ubiquitous surveillance is accepted as fact. I don't know what you've been reading, but I think more than a few plausible scenarios have been raised. Indeed, more than a few have come to pass in the UK. Networked ubiquitous cameras can lead to increased profiling, increased pressure for social conformity, and decreased political participation and a chill on public participation.
Hmmm. Sure sounds like land of the free and home of the brave to me. Yay for police states.
Fortunately, slashdot freedom fighters do not make decisions in this world.
More's the pity, since then there'd be at least a chance we won't waltz blindly into the future and wake up to find it, as Orwell once said, "a boot stamping on a human face--for ever."
I'm not sure what a mongo is (my only knowledge of the word is its use for an astrophysics graphing package) but suddenly I feel proud to be one.
Unfortunately, people do care how I dress, and how you dress, and how anyone dress. They care whether I agree with them. Many many people are directly threatened by the mere existence of someone different from them, someone who perhaps -- even in the secret of his mind -- believes differently.
If you don't think constant universal surveillance will be used to exert social pressure, you're too naive to even begin a discussion with.
And yes, I say "corny" things like this in real life, because I don't divide my life into "real life" and online fantasy. I say what I feel. I think it's a shame that not too many people today say or understand the "corny" things.
Ah, yes. Because a sparse and sporadic collection of isolated cameras is entirely the same as a high-speed realtime system of linked cameras connected to a government-mandated universal database. How silly of me to see any worry in that.
Let's be less stupid here. Full time surveillance is not a reality in the States, yet, and is close to becoming one. It opens up a huge field of potential abuse, from police misuse to voyeurism to, conceivably, blackmail and character assassination. It takes the public spaces and assigns control over them to a limited, generally unelected few who often cannot be bothered to even write down the criteria under which the evidence gained would be used. It breeds social conformity and limits traditional freedoms of assembly, as well as chilling traditional rights to petition the government.
In return, we are offered some nice-sounding platitudes and an unsupported allegation that these systems might, in some cases, affect crime in some manner. The "evidence" for such is drawn from a decade of wide prosperity, wherein cities that adopted these systems and cities that did not, saw similar declines in crime.
It's fine to be in a police state, if you're the police. And if "universal 24/7 preemptive electronic surveillance" is not "police state" in your dictionary, it's time to grow up and use a real one.
Being concerned about a fundamental shift in the balance between individual liberty and police powers is not "paranoia". It's patriotism.
If 50,000 civilians in a mob (not inconceivable in a state even as small as mine, Virginia) rush onto a military base...
... then some jets or copters from a different base come and strafe them. Let's get real: No mob can long stand up to a modern army. At best, you're saying "My gun gives me the ability to disappear into the mountains and become a guerilla". If that.
Sure, if 50,000 people storm a base, you might reasonably expect people in the military to be equivalently honked off and so not support an air strike. But then it isn't your guns that's doing the convincing or the defending. It's the fact that the US military is not made of mindless automatons and malicious brutes... in other words, that we can trust the people in the military because they are us.
You can have your Second Amendment fantasies if you want, but please don't pretend they're relevant to the modern world. Red Dawn might have been a mildly amusing movie but it certainly isn't a political primer.
I'd imagine most of them act from misguided love for freedom rather than from having something to hide
Is it so easy to dismiss a love of freedom?
Maybe those of us who oppose cameras have read a little of human history and recognize how terrifyingly easily this system could become a prop of repression -- either official or social. I think I will simply quote Judge Brandeis, speaking presciently:
"The makers of our Constitution understood
the need to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness, and the protections
guaranteed by this are much broader in scope, and include the right to life and an
inviolate personality -- the right to be left alone -- the most comprehensive of rights
and the right most valued by civilized men."
There are lines we should not cross. There are freedoms we must not sacrfice. And there are roads we dare not tread.
That's the whole point - it helps investigation after the fact, and thus discourages the criminal.
We might get into a long debate into what the true motivation for these cameras really is. I'd just like to point out that they are being sold to the public for their alleged value in stopping terrorism in real time, not "after the fact".
For goodness sake, why bother to make it harder for the FBI than it is for a sys. admin?
Um, because:
The sys admin can't arrest me.
The sys admin isn't an agent of the Federal government.
The sys admin is essentially immune to subversion for political ends, or at least, vastly more so than the FBI.
The sys admin could be sued for damages.
Just for emphasis: The sys admin can't arrest me.
The agents of the government are still citizens but they are not merely citizens. It matters a lot when we expand the police power and constrict judicial oversight. In fact, it means the beginning of the end.
The bill of rights gave us protection from "unreasonable search and seizure" of our persons, papers and property but also provides the exception in the case of probable cause of law breaking.
Fair enough. Truth be told, the cooperation of the ISPs is not what worries me, nor what I meant to rail against. They are, at least, conforming to accepted usages of law. I am much more worried by, say, the Senate bill that expanded the validity of warrantless searches and that allows the FBI or the Justice Dept to cloak anything and everything behind an unbreachable wall of "potential threat to national security". I firmly believed judicial oversight is necessary.
Right now, everyone's pulling together and inquiries are legitimate. How long, though, will it be before some FBI bureaucrat slips up? How long will he resist the temptation to bury everything under the National Security fence?
Let me make a suggestion, and I mean this seriously to anyone who hasn't really looked into it: pick a few books about World War II.
Hmmm. I sort of think the 20+ books I've read over the course of the past few years -- about WWII, the political aspects leading up to it and following it, the restrictions during and following it, and the legal issues raised -- might qualify me just a little to speak on this, at least as an informed lay person.
Don't pull your sanctimonious crap on me. Just because I don't agree with your position doesn't mean I am ignorant, any more than your disagreeing with me makes you so. Indeed, I have read avidly and thoroughly and have pondered much about both WW II and the impact terrorism has on democracies. I'd been thinking about it long before Sep 11. And I guess I would say that anyone who posted your message demonstrates little true understanding of the fragility and value of the American experiment.
Civil liberties mean "a damn" especially at a time like this, when legitimate fears lead people to call for their erosion. Unlike every knee-jerk reactionary, I have faith in America that we can -- and will -- work out a way to protect our nation and our fundamental liberties. I have faith that a nation can protect its citizens within the rule of law. I have faith that the American spirit can triumph over the darkness that illuminates the hearts of the terrorists and over the fear that clouds the hearts of citizens.
We are stronger than that. We are smarter than that. We are better than that.
I am ready to start making sacrifices to ensure that you and I do not meet the same fate.
Bravo. I hope when the call comes, you retain your civic-mindedness. But I am struck by #4 of your willing sacrifices:
My life. I am willing to die for my country, my way of life and to protect civilization
Protect civilization? By sacrificing all that is good and true in it? By making a mockery of the sacrifice of thousands before you? By abandoning the principles that have made this nation the largest free, open, and lawful society in the history of humanity? I'm not sure exactly what you think you'll be "protecting" as you support calls for abridging traditional freedoms. Now is exactly the time to worry about civil liberties and the natural tendency to curtail them. Our freedoms are precisely what makes "us" different from "them", and it would be horrible if we allow these terrorists to succeed because we are too mad or too scared to remember our proud heritage of the rule of law.
What are you willing to sacrifice?
I am willing to sacrifice time and treasure. I am willing to risk the lives of those sworn to protect the United States, and I am willing to serve if called. I am willing to sacrifice convenience and comfort.
And I am willing to sacrifice the entirely-reasonable but utterly dangerous lust for vengeance that could drive us more toward what we fight than what we are. I am willing to sacrifice a little safety in preservation of our traditional freedoms and the rule of law.
the only thing the feds are after are the guys who killed 5000+ of our citizens.
... for now.
It's not that the desire is so out of place, as worry as to how far this will go. What seems urgent now becomes convenient becomes standard becomes routine becomes indispensable. And then we see the FBI saying, "Well, drugs kill thousands of Americans each year. So do drunk drivers. And anyone manipulating the market disrupts the economy and impacts millions. And those who associate with anyone who is eventually linked to any of these must be suspect themselves..."
Don't let the terrorists win! Don't sanction the uprooting of fundamental liberties for the impression of action and the illusion of safety. What is most desired by these despicable people is exactly that we become them, that we give up on three centuries of open and free government.
Franklin was talking about liberties far more essential than what is being debated here.
Franklin and his contemporaries would likely have argued that there are few, if any, liberties more important than the open operation of courts under the rule of law... and that one of those few would be freedom of speech.
Um, both of which are curtailed by this bill.
I'm certain Franklin would consider his quote a propos.
Your freedom means NOTHING if you are not alive to exercise it and/or your country no longer exists.
Your life means nothing if your freedoms no longer exist.
How can people not see that legislation like this is one of the goals of the terrorists? It will hardly impact them at all, because they have more reliable, cheaper methods available. But to reduce risk a little -- no, belay that. To appear to reduce risk a little, Congress as usual is willing to erode the basic freedoms and guaranties that the American Revolution was about, that have permitted the largest open society, that have led to all the other ancilliary benefits of being American.
I simply do not understand a need to bypass the courts. It is essentially handing the judicial power of the government over to the executive branch, and any major reshuffling of power is a dangerous thing.
The people who committed this outrage are looking to make us react. They cannot stand the existence of an open society governed by the rule of law, because it contradicts their own desparate need to believe only in the rule of force. Lacking legitimacy, they must seek to deny it to all others. And we, like idiots, will be happy to do it.
I mourn, with all Americans, for the victims and their families. I feel the rage and impotence of being a citizen of the most powerful country in history and still being unable to protect our own. I want to bring the clenched right fist of God down on those responsible and to utterly exterminate them and the sociopolitical virus that spawned them.
But I don't want to do so at the price of everything that makes this a country worth living in and dying for.
but it's completely lopsided in the other direction, because while we can filter and reencode the CD industry's "secure" data files to our hearts' content, the government doesn't have write access to a hundred million webpages.
Easily. If you kill yourself because you're afraid to face life, it's cowardly. If you kill yourself because you can't face the consequences (guilt, arrest, torture, what have you), it's cowardly.
There is no intrinsic moral value to the suicide bomber. There are causes worthy of dying for, and there are causes no worthy. Many people lose their way between the two.
And Texas Instruments position in the computer world is what, now?
I don't have market share numbers and have no idea where to look. But in the particular market referenced (i.e., scientific/graphical calculators), TI is a major player still... in no small part due to their tolerance of hacks into their operating systems.
In the US they expire 70 years after the owner's death, or 95 years from publication if owned by a company.
Actually I knew that. I thought I was being transparently sarcastic -- thus the smiley -- but I guess not. Considering things like the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act (the freebie extra 20 years granted to existing copyrights because, hey, it's unthinkable that Mickey Mouse go public domain... esp. after Disney spent so much non-refundable, non-deductible money buying senators and congresspeople), it appears that perhaps nothing will ever enter the public domain again. And if something does, it seems likely to be wrapped behind "access control" mechanisms that grant an effective permament copyright to the content provider.
Should privacy be a constitutional right equal to free speech and freedom of religion?
There's a certain appeal, but I am wary of any Constitutional amendment, especially one that treads near First Amendment ones. I am afraid people are too myopic to understand the 9th and 10th Amendments; that is, by marking some things off limits we create the automatic assumption that other things must be OK.
A judge's personal privacy is no more important than mine!
True enough, but I think this is more productively parsed in the other sense: My privacy is no less important than a judge's is.
I fervently hope the judges do fight this, and successfully. And then have the courage and consistently to start ruling that the rest of us have the same right to privacy in our workplaces.
That's for a judge or an arbiter to decide, not a marketroid.
Well, lately, the Deep Pockets that control the latter seem to control all the former, too.:(
Why do all of these things start with a cease-and-desist -- which often ends up being ignored until the actual legal proceedings -- and not a simple, polite letter? Oops, I forgot: billable hours
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but that sounds a trite paternalistic. We don't kill socieities. We offer options, we offer alternatives, and (most heinous of all) we offer an example. If the West is culturally overwhelming the rest of the world, well, they're buying the crap. They're making a choice.
To say that we should somehow censor ourselves and not "inflict" the spread of Western values (both noble and base), is yet again to set the West up as the arbiter of what is good and true for all. Oh, no, you can't have blue jeans... you're not ready for them yet.
I really don't see how that attitude would be any improvement. Currently, at least it's a choice being made.
Um, if someone throws a brick through your window, it's not terrorism. It's vandalism. Let's not debase the language just because it's fashionable. And there's the rub: People want to call everything "terrorism" because they know the public will accept (right now) almost anything in the name of a crusade against terrorism.
Right. Surveillance by unaccountable secret police played no role in either Nazi Germany or the USSR. The weather must be nice on your planet.
Those two countries are prime examples of what can happen when the principle of ubiquitous surveillance is accepted as fact. I don't know what you've been reading, but I think more than a few plausible scenarios have been raised. Indeed, more than a few have come to pass in the UK. Networked ubiquitous cameras can lead to increased profiling, increased pressure for social conformity, and decreased political participation and a chill on public participation.
Hmmm. Sure sounds like land of the free and home of the brave to me. Yay for police states.
More's the pity, since then there'd be at least a chance we won't waltz blindly into the future and wake up to find it, as Orwell once said, "a boot stamping on a human face--for ever."
:) Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Unfortunately, people do care how I dress, and how you dress, and how anyone dress. They care whether I agree with them. Many many people are directly threatened by the mere existence of someone different from them, someone who perhaps -- even in the secret of his mind -- believes differently.
If you don't think constant universal surveillance will be used to exert social pressure, you're too naive to even begin a discussion with.
And yes, I say "corny" things like this in real life, because I don't divide my life into "real life" and online fantasy. I say what I feel. I think it's a shame that not too many people today say or understand the "corny" things.
Let's be less stupid here. Full time surveillance is not a reality in the States, yet, and is close to becoming one. It opens up a huge field of potential abuse, from police misuse to voyeurism to, conceivably, blackmail and character assassination. It takes the public spaces and assigns control over them to a limited, generally unelected few who often cannot be bothered to even write down the criteria under which the evidence gained would be used. It breeds social conformity and limits traditional freedoms of assembly, as well as chilling traditional rights to petition the government.
In return, we are offered some nice-sounding platitudes and an unsupported allegation that these systems might, in some cases, affect crime in some manner. The "evidence" for such is drawn from a decade of wide prosperity, wherein cities that adopted these systems and cities that did not, saw similar declines in crime.
It's fine to be in a police state, if you're the police. And if "universal 24/7 preemptive electronic surveillance" is not "police state" in your dictionary, it's time to grow up and use a real one.
Being concerned about a fundamental shift in the balance between individual liberty and police powers is not "paranoia". It's patriotism.
... then some jets or copters from a different base come and strafe them. Let's get real: No mob can long stand up to a modern army. At best, you're saying "My gun gives me the ability to disappear into the mountains and become a guerilla". If that.
Sure, if 50,000 people storm a base, you might reasonably expect people in the military to be equivalently honked off and so not support an air strike. But then it isn't your guns that's doing the convincing or the defending. It's the fact that the US military is not made of mindless automatons and malicious brutes... in other words, that we can trust the people in the military because they are us.
You can have your Second Amendment fantasies if you want, but please don't pretend they're relevant to the modern world. Red Dawn might have been a mildly amusing movie but it certainly isn't a political primer.
Is it so easy to dismiss a love of freedom?
Maybe those of us who oppose cameras have read a little of human history and recognize how terrifyingly easily this system could become a prop of repression -- either official or social. I think I will simply quote Judge Brandeis, speaking presciently:
There are lines we should not cross. There are freedoms we must not sacrfice. And there are roads we dare not tread.
We might get into a long debate into what the true motivation for these cameras really is. I'd just like to point out that they are being sold to the public for their alleged value in stopping terrorism in real time, not "after the fact".
- The sys admin can't arrest me.
- The sys admin isn't an agent of the Federal government.
- The sys admin is essentially immune to subversion for political ends, or at least, vastly more so than the FBI.
- The sys admin could be sued for damages.
- Just for emphasis: The sys admin can't arrest me.
The agents of the government are still citizens but they are not merely citizens. It matters a lot when we expand the police power and constrict judicial oversight. In fact, it means the beginning of the end.Fair enough. Truth be told, the cooperation of the ISPs is not what worries me, nor what I meant to rail against. They are, at least, conforming to accepted usages of law. I am much more worried by, say, the Senate bill that expanded the validity of warrantless searches and that allows the FBI or the Justice Dept to cloak anything and everything behind an unbreachable wall of "potential threat to national security". I firmly believed judicial oversight is necessary.
Right now, everyone's pulling together and inquiries are legitimate. How long, though, will it be before some FBI bureaucrat slips up? How long will he resist the temptation to bury everything under the National Security fence?
Hmmm. I sort of think the 20+ books I've read over the course of the past few years -- about WWII, the political aspects leading up to it and following it, the restrictions during and following it, and the legal issues raised -- might qualify me just a little to speak on this, at least as an informed lay person.
Don't pull your sanctimonious crap on me. Just because I don't agree with your position doesn't mean I am ignorant, any more than your disagreeing with me makes you so. Indeed, I have read avidly and thoroughly and have pondered much about both WW II and the impact terrorism has on democracies. I'd been thinking about it long before Sep 11. And I guess I would say that anyone who posted your message demonstrates little true understanding of the fragility and value of the American experiment.
Civil liberties mean "a damn" especially at a time like this, when legitimate fears lead people to call for their erosion. Unlike every knee-jerk reactionary, I have faith in America that we can -- and will -- work out a way to protect our nation and our fundamental liberties. I have faith that a nation can protect its citizens within the rule of law. I have faith that the American spirit can triumph over the darkness that illuminates the hearts of the terrorists and over the fear that clouds the hearts of citizens.
We are stronger than that. We are smarter than that. We are better than that.
Bravo. I hope when the call comes, you retain your civic-mindedness. But I am struck by #4 of your willing sacrifices:
Protect civilization? By sacrificing all that is good and true in it? By making a mockery of the sacrifice of thousands before you? By abandoning the principles that have made this nation the largest free, open, and lawful society in the history of humanity? I'm not sure exactly what you think you'll be "protecting" as you support calls for abridging traditional freedoms. Now is exactly the time to worry about civil liberties and the natural tendency to curtail them. Our freedoms are precisely what makes "us" different from "them", and it would be horrible if we allow these terrorists to succeed because we are too mad or too scared to remember our proud heritage of the rule of law.
I am willing to sacrifice time and treasure. I am willing to risk the lives of those sworn to protect the United States, and I am willing to serve if called. I am willing to sacrifice convenience and comfort.
And I am willing to sacrifice the entirely-reasonable but utterly dangerous lust for vengeance that could drive us more toward what we fight than what we are. I am willing to sacrifice a little safety in preservation of our traditional freedoms and the rule of law.
Are you?
... for now.
It's not that the desire is so out of place, as worry as to how far this will go. What seems urgent now becomes convenient becomes standard becomes routine becomes indispensable. And then we see the FBI saying, "Well, drugs kill thousands of Americans each year. So do drunk drivers. And anyone manipulating the market disrupts the economy and impacts millions. And those who associate with anyone who is eventually linked to any of these must be suspect themselves..."
Don't let the terrorists win! Don't sanction the uprooting of fundamental liberties for the impression of action and the illusion of safety. What is most desired by these despicable people is exactly that we become them, that we give up on three centuries of open and free government.
Franklin and his contemporaries would likely have argued that there are few, if any, liberties more important than the open operation of courts under the rule of law... and that one of those few would be freedom of speech.
Um, both of which are curtailed by this bill.
I'm certain Franklin would consider his quote a propos.
Your life means nothing if your freedoms no longer exist.
How can people not see that legislation like this is one of the goals of the terrorists? It will hardly impact them at all, because they have more reliable, cheaper methods available. But to reduce risk a little -- no, belay that. To appear to reduce risk a little, Congress as usual is willing to erode the basic freedoms and guaranties that the American Revolution was about, that have permitted the largest open society, that have led to all the other ancilliary benefits of being American.
I simply do not understand a need to bypass the courts. It is essentially handing the judicial power of the government over to the executive branch, and any major reshuffling of power is a dangerous thing.
The people who committed this outrage are looking to make us react. They cannot stand the existence of an open society governed by the rule of law, because it contradicts their own desparate need to believe only in the rule of force. Lacking legitimacy, they must seek to deny it to all others. And we, like idiots, will be happy to do it.
I mourn, with all Americans, for the victims and their families. I feel the rage and impotence of being a citizen of the most powerful country in history and still being unable to protect our own. I want to bring the clenched right fist of God down on those responsible and to utterly exterminate them and the sociopolitical virus that spawned them.
But I don't want to do so at the price of everything that makes this a country worth living in and dying for.
... yet.
Easily. If you kill yourself because you're afraid to face life, it's cowardly. If you kill yourself because you can't face the consequences (guilt, arrest, torture, what have you), it's cowardly.
There is no intrinsic moral value to the suicide bomber. There are causes worthy of dying for, and there are causes no worthy. Many people lose their way between the two.
I don't have market share numbers and have no idea where to look. But in the particular market referenced (i.e., scientific/graphical calculators), TI is a major player still... in no small part due to their tolerance of hacks into their operating systems.
Actually I knew that. I thought I was being transparently sarcastic -- thus the smiley -- but I guess not. Considering things like the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act (the freebie extra 20 years granted to existing copyrights because, hey, it's unthinkable that Mickey Mouse go public domain... esp. after Disney spent so much non-refundable, non-deductible money buying senators and congresspeople), it appears that perhaps nothing will ever enter the public domain again. And if something does, it seems likely to be wrapped behind "access control" mechanisms that grant an effective permament copyright to the content provider.
Um, actually, I never stopped doing it.
And I stand proudly on my record that it is not the form but the content of my posts that make me sound like an idiot.
Hah. As if copyrights expire.
:)
There's a certain appeal, but I am wary of any Constitutional amendment, especially one that treads near First Amendment ones. I am afraid people are too myopic to understand the 9th and 10th Amendments; that is, by marking some things off limits we create the automatic assumption that other things must be OK.
True enough, but I think this is more productively parsed in the other sense: My privacy is no less important than a judge's is.
I fervently hope the judges do fight this, and successfully. And then have the courage and consistently to start ruling that the rest of us have the same right to privacy in our workplaces.
Well, lately, the Deep Pockets that control the latter seem to control all the former, too.
Why do all of these things start with a cease-and-desist -- which often ends up being ignored until the actual legal proceedings -- and not a simple, polite letter? Oops, I forgot: billable hours