The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What part of that do you feel authorizes the government to collect detailed information about our private lives? Or do you think email is not "papers" because it's stored electronically and that if our founding fathers meant for email to be included, they would have had the foresight to include electronic document storage?
Those who worry are usually those who have something to hide or something criminal in the works.. Bottom line, you can't care about this, unless you do wrong or plan on doing wrong. That's kinda how I see it.
Of course, some don't have such myopic views that they worry only about what will happen to the data today, but wonder what will happen 5 years, 10 years, or longer from now when the government has a huge database of everything we do and who we do it with, and that a future government may decide that someone or something that we've associated with years ago is against the public good. Or maybe someone has political aspirations and doesn't want the party in power to able to dredge up all sorts of gossip at the click of a button. Or maybe one thinks that those that control the information also control who comes into power through the use of that information, perpetuating a surveillance state.
There are lots of reasons to not want the government tracking our every move.
I'm not talking about civil rights. I'm a conservative libertarian. I'm talking about economic and personal freedom. Some of us just want to be left the hell alone while others demand that someone oversee what I do in my personal and financial life. It is how things used to be and the system worked quite well. For example, there are more people in poverty today than there was when Johnson declared a "War on Poverty". There are more people smoking marijuana today than there was before marijuana was made to be illegal. More people have a cocaine problem today than when cocaine was legal and could be purchased in a bottle of Coca Cola. the federal deficit was smaller before there was an income tax. The list goes on and on.
There are those of us who see that when government makes up a problem and declares war on it, that problem always gets worse. You would think that people would realize this and just stop it, but that hasn't happened. It has actually gotten worse. It seems that the more government fails, the more people demand that the government needs to grow to fix those problems. It's an endless cycle and the only end I see is absolute failure before we are allowed to restore what works.
So if you see all of these problems with the country, why would you tell someone that may want to fix some of them "We don't need your 'improvement'"? Is it your believe that any attempt to rein in the problems (like, for example, having more sane drug laws) will only make things worse?
I think you just answered that - because it's the place I live... my family, my friends, my home, my job, etc are all here in the USA so why would I want to pack up and leave? And if I really feel that what I'm advocating is an improvement, why wouldn't I want to share it with everyone?
Because we don't want your "improvement" and we don't have the option of moving as there is no place else in the world that has the economic opportunity and freedom that the US has.
Hmm...isn't that what people said about racial segregation? We don't want "those" people on "our" bus or drinking from "our" fountains? Or about gay rights "If we let the gays marry, then everyone will want to marry their dogs and once heterosexual people see homosexual people in committed marriages, it will tear heterosexual marriages apart!".
I didn't even say what "improvement" I wanted, so how can you say that you don't want it? Don't you value my freedom of speech? You're trying to shut down my opinion before I even voiced it.
That's a great comeback -- don't like something about your country? Well pack up, get out, and move someplace worse because america is perfect the way it is so you either need to accept that or get out - we don't need your changes!
A couple of points here. First, Snowden ironically fled to Hong Kong, which is China. I think the GP was making a joke. Here's your whoosh!
When an AC says something that could be trolling or could be some wry insightful sarcasm, I always err on the side of Trolling
But in response to your post, there is some logic behind the "Love it or Leave it" argument. For example, there are many in America who want to make America like Europe, and work hard to transform it to that. It makes sense to ask these people, "Why don't you just move to Europe?" Here is why the logic works: If they were to move to Europe, they could line under a government that is exactly what they want. They'll be happy there. As a bonus, those of us who like things in America the way they are get to stay and live in under a government that is exactly what we want. It's a win-win! We all get what we want. On the other hand, when they stay and fight to transform America, they make themselves miserable living in a country they don't like and make the rest of us miserable fighting to keep them from changing America into a country we won't want.
Why try to change the place you live into someplace else when you could simply move to that someplace else?
Please forgive the off-topicness
I think you just answered that - because it's the place I live... my family, my friends, my home, my job, etc are all here in the USA so why would I want to pack up and leave? And if I really feel that what I'm advocating is an improvement, why wouldn't I want to share it with everyone?
Of course, no human actually does this for regular citizens, and no human looks at it — unless you are being investigated, which the government don't need probable cause to do (according to their interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT act.) Then it really is as if someone had followed you and recorded all of this information.
I doubt you need to be under active investigation to come under scrutiny by an analyst, all you need to do is have similar call patterns as a suspected terrorist and come up in an automated data mining search "Hey, terrorist XYZ made calls to a bunch of Home Depots, Radio Shacks, and truck rental places before he built his bomb. And look, Joe Public called nearly the same set of places. Let's take a look at his email to see what he's been up to". I bet they'd be able to subpoena your email with a single click from the analyst's search app if Amazon hadn't gotten that one-click-shopping patent.
That's a great comeback -- don't like something about your country? Well pack up, get out, and move someplace worse because america is perfect the way it is so you either need to accept that or get out - we don't need your changes!
This story already has violations of the 1st, 4th, 9th and 10th amendments. Are you this apathetic even now? Really?
Wow, so innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply here? Look, I STRONGLY believe that the NSA was likely violating at minimum our 4th amendment rights but this is a big mess and the only thing I'm certain of is that I don't know all the details yet and neither do you. This matter will take years to settle and a knee jerk reaction based on the limited (though seemingly damning) facts we have so far serves little purpose.
Well, no, the Constitutional right to a fair trial and presumption of innocence doesn't apply to the government. The Constitution is supposed to protect us from an overbearing government, it's not supposed to protect the government from the People asserting their Rights. The Government makes the rules, so they already have an upper hand, there's no reason to assume their innocence.
What in the world do you mean? Do you think it is fine that the government was secretly monitoring everyone's phone records?
Not at all. I merely mean that we do not have all the facts yet. On the surface it looks pretty damning of the government but I'd be shocked if we know the whole picture at this point.
What additional facts do you expect? No one is disputing the veracity of the document he leaked, and not only has the government not denied that the domestic surveillance is going on, but that we should all just accept it because it's been going on for years.
What possible facts could come out to make this seem better? We all know that they claim to be doing it under the guise of anti-terrorism, but many people aren't willing to give up privacy and allow all of their electronic audit trails to be cataloged by the government in return for some small reduction in terrorism. And I really think that blanket surveillance is going to have only a modest effect against terrorism since there are many ways for a terorrist cell to communicate without arousing suspicion.
No, he was wrong period. He exposed classified information and that's against the law and dangerous to our country. If he had such a moral issue with what was going on he should have used whatever internal chain of command to make his issues known. This is especially true if he though his acts were illegal - use the chain of command and report it INTERNALLY. Exposing this information was a very stupid and dangerous thing to do. His act also sets a dangerous precedent that if others follow could cause real damage.
It's clear that there was no chain of command to make his issues "known" when the president himself along with most (all?) of congress knew about the surveillance and thinks its just fine and we should all just shut up because it's been going on for years. And he may very well have tried to follow the normal chain of command only to have his issues dismissed because the surveillance was authorized by the Patriot act, so it was perfectly legal (whether or not it was morally wrong).
When there's no way to make your issues known to the people it affects (i.e. citizens of the USA), what other choice did he have to make the issues known?
Have you never considered that Google itself may be a department of the NSA?
Or maybe the NSA is a Google department.
And they are both a division of the Illuminati, along with Facebook. It's no coincidence that Illuminati has three I's, but NSA, Google, or Facebook don't have a single "I" in their names -- they are purposely trying to distance themselves from their Illuminati overlords. Who, in turn, are controlled by the Aliens, but I've already said too much.
Not the OP, but you have no idea what it's like to work at [insert Silicon valley company here]. Personally identifiable information (including IP addresses and emails) have ridiculous protections in place. There would be multiple layers of people demanding to scrutinize the code before it could ever even hope to touch anything useful.
"Did you not understand when I said the team is reporting directly to *me* and they require your full cooperation? This is an extremely important project, has been fully vetted by Legal, and the team is comprised of handpicked senior engineers (who have suddenly started being dropped off at the office by black SUV's). Or would you rather bring up your concerns with HR at your exit interview?"
I think this goes beyond a few employees walking out with the occasional thumb drive. If they have a link inside Google* it means a sh*tload of additional traffic to their backbone provider. Or a dedicated fiber link. Someone would notice.
Depends what data they are monitoring, if they are just capturing search queries and IP addresses, it's not that much data. Google gets around 4B queries/day. If each query log entry consumes 256 bytes (should be less with compression?) that's 1TB of data per day, which *would* fit on a thumb drive. Or consume around 100mbit/second of bandwidth, which would be lost in the noise of Google's outbound bandwidth (or served by a single AT&T fiber drop that terminates at the NSA)
*Its more likely this is being monitored in real time at the backbone providers. The same people that were given unconditional amnesty for handing customer data out. Cue the movie scene where the crooked cop has all the local hoods on a short leash when he needs some dirty work done.
Depends on whether or not they want to see SSL encrypted data too. Few believe that the NSA has the compute power to decrypt billions of SSL transactions a day.
Do you really think that nobody would notice this stream of ridiculously sensitive data flowing out of the systems? Especially after the paranoia inspired by the Aurora attacks from the Chinese? I guarantee you this stuff would be found out near immediately. Also keep in mind that the people who work at these companies are geeky engineer types, which means they very likely feel just as strongly about all this as anyone.
What would you say when your boss tells you "Hey, Bill and Jeff are working on an analytics project that will give us a huge edge in the market. They're keeping their equipment in those two racks in the datacenter marked "Secret analytics product - keep out". They'll be hitting your API's to pull out some search data from our front-ends for deeper analysis of customer search patterns, and will be reporting directly to me.
Especially if there are 5 or 6 "secret" projects going on at the same time to test out new technology.
Possibly but I have to think at least some of these billionaires would say hold on, and buy a half hour block of TV that evening to have a chat with America.
"Sergey and Larry, we know the Justice department has been hard on your company, and we've heard that they are going to open a lot more probes into your business practices, you'll be deposed so many times that you may as well move to Washington DC. I think we could make things better for you if you'll just agree to let us put a few of our employees in your datacenters....as a token showing of good faith, we're giving you use of NASA's runway at Moffett Field for your little 767 jet"
There's always the chance that NSA has Google employees on its payroll that are tasked with secretly handing off data. They could even be there under a verbal handshake agreement with Google management, giving Google plausible deniability in case they are ever discovered: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that data gathering is going on in here!"
Then everyone is happy - the NSA gets their data, and Google can legitimately say that "they" are not handing over data to the NSA.
And since secret FISA orders can apparently compel anyone to do just about anything and keep it a secret, there's nothing illegal about it.
Obama did sign the bill in 2011, didn't he? You make it sound like all of this stuff just happened around him and he has nothing whatever to do with it.
Harry Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read "The Buck Stops Here." Neither Obama, nor his acolytes, believe that he is responsible for anything that they do not like.
I was trying to make it sound like there was stronger Republican support for the bill than Democratic support, so it's not like the Patriot Act would have expired or been vetoed if there were a Republican in the Whitehouse, especially since the initial bill and first renewal happened under a republican president (and yes, voted for by Senator Obama).
In the case of AT&T there were real physical limits to the number of calls that could be made from A -> B, and if the last slot was used by a hacker, there was one less slot for a paying customer. Most of the time there was overcapacity, mostly because AT&T did overcharge business customers, so they could afford to overbuild.
Yeah, that's kind of my point - unless AT&T was building more capacity to support the hacked phone calls, then there was really no real cost to them (except maybe termination charges for international calls). If it was really costing them money, then they would have found a way to stop the hacking sooner. Just like how if a million copies of Microsoft office are pirated in China, that doesn't mean Microsoft lost $500 * 1 million = $500 million dollars since it's unlikely that many of the people that used a pirated copy would have bought a copy at full retail price.
None of those are federal laws. Your city government isn't snooping on you, the feds are.
Is there really any difference? If "they" want you brought in for questioning, they only need the tiniest justification. "Your honor, I stopped the suspect for jaywalking, and then while I was writing a citiation and asked for ID, he became belligerent and hostile toward me, so I had no choice but to tazer him and book him for resisting arrest. When I ran his fingerprints and DNA, the FBI came in and said they wanted him held for further questioning based on some suspicious phone calls he made back in 2003.".
Were hackers really racking up millions of dollars of fraudulent calls, or was AT&T using the same inflated math that the BSA use to calculate loss of revenue from piracy -- by using full retail prices, even though there may have been no loss of revenue or cost to the carrier. AT&T may have been charging 75 cents/minute for a peak time cross country call in 1975, but that doesn't mean that the incremental cost to handle a call cost them anything at all.
They managed by beating the children into submission. The ipad is a much better approach.
I disagree - playing car games, family singalongs, mom reading us a book (or older siblings reading to younger), impromptu spelling bees, going through math flash cards, etc on long car trips seemed a much better way to spend the time together than having each kid with his headphones on and head buried in his electronic device.
My family made nearly annual trips from New England to Florida for vacation to see the grandparents, no one got beaten into submission and we all have fond memories of those trips, even our parents.
We even survived a few car breakdowns without cellphones to call for help - back then, other motorists were willing to stop and help, or at least drive to the next town to send back a tow truck.
What's the use of turning off an option in a browser made by a company that acts hand in glove with its domestic intelligence agency? How can anyone trust one checkbox in Chrome after this?
Slashdot Mirror
How would you interpret this:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What part of that do you feel authorizes the government to collect detailed information about our private lives? Or do you think email is not "papers" because it's stored electronically and that if our founding fathers meant for email to be included, they would have had the foresight to include electronic document storage?
Those who worry are usually those who have something to hide or something criminal in the works.. Bottom line, you can't care about this, unless you do wrong or plan on doing wrong. That's kinda how I see it.
Of course, some don't have such myopic views that they worry only about what will happen to the data today, but wonder what will happen 5 years, 10 years, or longer from now when the government has a huge database of everything we do and who we do it with, and that a future government may decide that someone or something that we've associated with years ago is against the public good. Or maybe someone has political aspirations and doesn't want the party in power to able to dredge up all sorts of gossip at the click of a button. Or maybe one thinks that those that control the information also control who comes into power through the use of that information, perpetuating a surveillance state.
There are lots of reasons to not want the government tracking our every move.
I'm not talking about civil rights. I'm a conservative libertarian. I'm talking about economic and personal freedom.
Some of us just want to be left the hell alone while others demand that someone oversee what I do in my personal and financial life. It is how things used to be and the system worked quite well. For example, there are more people in poverty today than there was when Johnson declared a "War on Poverty". There are more people smoking marijuana today than there was before marijuana was made to be illegal. More people have a cocaine problem today than when cocaine was legal and could be purchased in a bottle of Coca Cola. the federal deficit was smaller before there was an income tax. The list goes on and on.
There are those of us who see that when government makes up a problem and declares war on it, that problem always gets worse. You would think that people would realize this and just stop it, but that hasn't happened. It has actually gotten worse. It seems that the more government fails, the more people demand that the government needs to grow to fix those problems. It's an endless cycle and the only end I see is absolute failure before we are allowed to restore what works.
So if you see all of these problems with the country, why would you tell someone that may want to fix some of them "We don't need your 'improvement'"? Is it your believe that any attempt to rein in the problems (like, for example, having more sane drug laws) will only make things worse?
I think you just answered that - because it's the place I live... my family, my friends, my home, my job, etc are all here in the USA so why would I want to pack up and leave? And if I really feel that what I'm advocating is an improvement, why wouldn't I want to share it with everyone?
Because we don't want your "improvement" and we don't have the option of moving as there is no place else in the world that has the economic opportunity and freedom that the US has.
Hmm...isn't that what people said about racial segregation? We don't want "those" people on "our" bus or drinking from "our" fountains? Or about gay rights "If we let the gays marry, then everyone will want to marry their dogs and once heterosexual people see homosexual people in committed marriages, it will tear heterosexual marriages apart!".
I didn't even say what "improvement" I wanted, so how can you say that you don't want it? Don't you value my freedom of speech? You're trying to shut down my opinion before I even voiced it.
Don't like it? Move to China.
That's a great comeback -- don't like something about your country? Well pack up, get out, and move someplace worse because america is perfect the way it is so you either need to accept that or get out - we don't need your changes!
A couple of points here. First, Snowden ironically fled to Hong Kong, which is China. I think the GP was making a joke. Here's your whoosh!
When an AC says something that could be trolling or could be some wry insightful sarcasm, I always err on the side of Trolling
But in response to your post, there is some logic behind the "Love it or Leave it" argument. For example, there are many in America who want to make America like Europe, and work hard to transform it to that. It makes sense to ask these people, "Why don't you just move to Europe?" Here is why the logic works: If they were to move to Europe, they could line under a government that is exactly what they want. They'll be happy there. As a bonus, those of us who like things in America the way they are get to stay and live in under a government that is exactly what we want. It's a win-win! We all get what we want. On the other hand, when they stay and fight to transform America, they make themselves miserable living in a country they don't like and make the rest of us miserable fighting to keep them from changing America into a country we won't want.
Why try to change the place you live into someplace else when you could simply move to that someplace else?
Please forgive the off-topicness
I think you just answered that - because it's the place I live... my family, my friends, my home, my job, etc are all here in the USA so why would I want to pack up and leave? And if I really feel that what I'm advocating is an improvement, why wouldn't I want to share it with everyone?
Of course, no human actually does this for regular citizens, and no human looks at it — unless you are being investigated, which the government don't need probable cause to do (according to their interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT act.) Then it really is as if someone had followed you and recorded all of this information.
I doubt you need to be under active investigation to come under scrutiny by an analyst, all you need to do is have similar call patterns as a suspected terrorist and come up in an automated data mining search "Hey, terrorist XYZ made calls to a bunch of Home Depots, Radio Shacks, and truck rental places before he built his bomb. And look, Joe Public called nearly the same set of places. Let's take a look at his email to see what he's been up to". I bet they'd be able to subpoena your email with a single click from the analyst's search app if Amazon hadn't gotten that one-click-shopping patent.
Don't like it? Move to China.
That's a great comeback -- don't like something about your country? Well pack up, get out, and move someplace worse because america is perfect the way it is so you either need to accept that or get out - we don't need your changes!
Remember boys, no Dongles allowed at Rails Girls, and certainly no forking. Stick with Django if you're interested in forking dongles.
This story already has violations of the 1st, 4th, 9th and 10th amendments. Are you this apathetic even now? Really?
Wow, so innocent until proven guilty doesn't apply here? Look, I STRONGLY believe that the NSA was likely violating at minimum our 4th amendment rights but this is a big mess and the only thing I'm certain of is that I don't know all the details yet and neither do you. This matter will take years to settle and a knee jerk reaction based on the limited (though seemingly damning) facts we have so far serves little purpose.
Well, no, the Constitutional right to a fair trial and presumption of innocence doesn't apply to the government. The Constitution is supposed to protect us from an overbearing government, it's not supposed to protect the government from the People asserting their Rights. The Government makes the rules, so they already have an upper hand, there's no reason to assume their innocence.
What in the world do you mean? Do you think it is fine that the government was secretly monitoring everyone's phone records?
Not at all. I merely mean that we do not have all the facts yet. On the surface it looks pretty damning of the government but I'd be shocked if we know the whole picture at this point.
What additional facts do you expect? No one is disputing the veracity of the document he leaked, and not only has the government not denied that the domestic surveillance is going on, but that we should all just accept it because it's been going on for years.
What possible facts could come out to make this seem better? We all know that they claim to be doing it under the guise of anti-terrorism, but many people aren't willing to give up privacy and allow all of their electronic audit trails to be cataloged by the government in return for some small reduction in terrorism. And I really think that blanket surveillance is going to have only a modest effect against terrorism since there are many ways for a terorrist cell to communicate without arousing suspicion.
No, he was wrong period. He exposed classified information and that's against the law and dangerous to our country. If he had such a moral issue with what was going on he should have used whatever internal chain of command to make his issues known. This is especially true if he though his acts were illegal - use the chain of command and report it INTERNALLY. Exposing this information was a very stupid and dangerous thing to do. His act also sets a dangerous precedent that if others follow could cause real damage.
It's clear that there was no chain of command to make his issues "known" when the president himself along with most (all?) of congress knew about the surveillance and thinks its just fine and we should all just shut up because it's been going on for years. And he may very well have tried to follow the normal chain of command only to have his issues dismissed because the surveillance was authorized by the Patriot act, so it was perfectly legal (whether or not it was morally wrong).
When there's no way to make your issues known to the people it affects (i.e. citizens of the USA), what other choice did he have to make the issues known?
Have you never considered that Google itself may be a department of the NSA?
Or maybe the NSA is a Google department.
And they are both a division of the Illuminati, along with Facebook. It's no coincidence that Illuminati has three I's, but NSA, Google, or Facebook don't have a single "I" in their names -- they are purposely trying to distance themselves from their Illuminati overlords. Who, in turn, are controlled by the Aliens, but I've already said too much.
Not the OP, but you have no idea what it's like to work at [insert Silicon valley company here]. Personally identifiable information (including IP addresses and emails) have ridiculous protections in place. There would be multiple layers of people demanding to scrutinize the code before it could ever even hope to touch anything useful.
"Did you not understand when I said the team is reporting directly to *me* and they require your full cooperation? This is an extremely important project, has been fully vetted by Legal, and the team is comprised of handpicked senior engineers (who have suddenly started being dropped off at the office by black SUV's). Or would you rather bring up your concerns with HR at your exit interview?"
I think this goes beyond a few employees walking out with the occasional thumb drive. If they have a link inside Google* it means a sh*tload of additional traffic to their backbone provider. Or a dedicated fiber link. Someone would notice.
Depends what data they are monitoring, if they are just capturing search queries and IP addresses, it's not that much data. Google gets around 4B queries/day. If each query log entry consumes 256 bytes (should be less with compression?) that's 1TB of data per day, which *would* fit on a thumb drive. Or consume around 100mbit/second of bandwidth, which would be lost in the noise of Google's outbound bandwidth (or served by a single AT&T fiber drop that terminates at the NSA)
*Its more likely this is being monitored in real time at the backbone providers. The same people that were given unconditional amnesty for handing customer data out. Cue the movie scene where the crooked cop has all the local hoods on a short leash when he needs some dirty work done.
Depends on whether or not they want to see SSL encrypted data too. Few believe that the NSA has the compute power to decrypt billions of SSL transactions a day.
Do you really think that nobody would notice this stream of ridiculously sensitive data flowing out of the systems? Especially after the paranoia inspired by the Aurora attacks from the Chinese? I guarantee you this stuff would be found out near immediately. Also keep in mind that the people who work at these companies are geeky engineer types, which means they very likely feel just as strongly about all this as anyone.
What would you say when your boss tells you "Hey, Bill and Jeff are working on an analytics project that will give us a huge edge in the market. They're keeping their equipment in those two racks in the datacenter marked "Secret analytics product - keep out". They'll be hitting your API's to pull out some search data from our front-ends for deeper analysis of customer search patterns, and will be reporting directly to me.
Especially if there are 5 or 6 "secret" projects going on at the same time to test out new technology.
Possibly but I have to think at least some of these billionaires would say hold on, and buy a half hour block of TV that evening to have a chat with America.
"Sergey and Larry, we know the Justice department has been hard on your company, and we've heard that they are going to open a lot more probes into your business practices, you'll be deposed so many times that you may as well move to Washington DC. I think we could make things better for you if you'll just agree to let us put a few of our employees in your datacenters....as a token showing of good faith, we're giving you use of NASA's runway at Moffett Field for your little 767 jet"
There's always the chance that NSA has Google employees on its payroll that are tasked with secretly handing off data. They could even be there under a verbal handshake agreement with Google management, giving Google plausible deniability in case they are ever discovered: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that data gathering is going on in here!"
Then everyone is happy - the NSA gets their data, and Google can legitimately say that "they" are not handing over data to the NSA.
And since secret FISA orders can apparently compel anyone to do just about anything and keep it a secret, there's nothing illegal about it.
Obama did sign the bill in 2011, didn't he? You make it sound like all of this stuff just happened around him and he has nothing whatever to do with it.
Harry Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that read "The Buck Stops Here." Neither Obama, nor his acolytes, believe that he is responsible for anything that they do not like.
I was trying to make it sound like there was stronger Republican support for the bill than Democratic support, so it's not like the Patriot Act would have expired or been vetoed if there were a Republican in the Whitehouse, especially since the initial bill and first renewal happened under a republican president (and yes, voted for by Senator Obama).
Yes, but.
In the case of AT&T there were real physical limits to the number of calls that could be made from A -> B, and if the last slot was used by a hacker, there was one less slot for a paying customer. Most of the time there was overcapacity, mostly because AT&T did overcharge business customers, so they could afford to overbuild.
Yeah, that's kind of my point - unless AT&T was building more capacity to support the hacked phone calls, then there was really no real cost to them (except maybe termination charges for international calls). If it was really costing them money, then they would have found a way to stop the hacking sooner. Just like how if a million copies of Microsoft office are pirated in China, that doesn't mean Microsoft lost $500 * 1 million = $500 million dollars since it's unlikely that many of the people that used a pirated copy would have bought a copy at full retail price.
None of those are federal laws. Your city government isn't snooping on you, the feds are.
Is there really any difference? If "they" want you brought in for questioning, they only need the tiniest justification. "Your honor, I stopped the suspect for jaywalking, and then while I was writing a citiation and asked for ID, he became belligerent and hostile toward me, so I had no choice but to tazer him and book him for resisting arrest. When I ran his fingerprints and DNA, the FBI came in and said they wanted him held for further questioning based on some suspicious phone calls he made back in 2003.".
LOL if you click "next" you can look at someone's pictures of wife and children.
Yeah, some people are less concerned with privacy than others, and leave their family photo albums open to the world.
Were hackers really racking up millions of dollars of fraudulent calls, or was AT&T using the same inflated math that the BSA use to calculate loss of revenue from piracy -- by using full retail prices, even though there may have been no loss of revenue or cost to the carrier. AT&T may have been charging 75 cents/minute for a peak time cross country call in 1975, but that doesn't mean that the incremental cost to handle a call cost them anything at all.
They managed by beating the children into submission. The ipad is a much better approach.
I disagree - playing car games, family singalongs, mom reading us a book (or older siblings reading to younger), impromptu spelling bees, going through math flash cards, etc on long car trips seemed a much better way to spend the time together than having each kid with his headphones on and head buried in his electronic device.
My family made nearly annual trips from New England to Florida for vacation to see the grandparents, no one got beaten into submission and we all have fond memories of those trips, even our parents.
We even survived a few car breakdowns without cellphones to call for help - back then, other motorists were willing to stop and help, or at least drive to the next town to send back a tow truck.
Most of what you listed aren't federal crimes.
They aren't pink unicorns either, but I didn't claim that they were.
What's the use of turning off an option in a browser made by a company that acts hand in glove with its domestic intelligence agency? How can anyone trust one checkbox in Chrome after this?
Build from source if you're paranoid: http://www.chromium.org/Home