Whenever I talk to my father about my identity theft and subsequent credit freeze, he tells me I should just change my SSN. Apparently, you *can* do that. However, it's not an easy process and I'd need to contact anyone who legitimately* has my SSN to update that. Once again, a criminal can do damage in one hour that the victim will be cleaning up for years.
* SSNs shouldn't be used as unique identifiers at all so read "legitimately" to mean "they shouldn't need it, it shouldn't be a unique identifier, but the system is set up to require it and good luck trying to force them to change."
This should go beyond just two years of free monitoring... what do I do when someone is out there impersonating me? Hope I have an alibi when they come looking for mr, but that's sort of tough to do when you're a basement dwelling hermit...
I'm an identity theft victim, albeit a lucky one who caught it early before too much damage was done, and it was scary when someone opened a credit card in my name. What's scarier, though, is if a criminal is arrested and gives your name/SSN/DOB. I used to read the blog of someone who was going through just that. He was fired from his job because he failed a background check, couldn't find a new job, and had police stalk him because they considered him a criminal (despite the fact that "his" mugshot looked nothing like him). Even when he got one department to remove his "conviction" from their records, it just flowed back from another police database. It took years before anyone would listen and years more before he started to make any real progress.
Unfortunately, you can't stop this with a simple credit freeze like you can stop normal identity theft. In fact, there's no way to stop this at all. Any criminal with your name/SSN/DOB could give that information when they are arrested and pass their arrest record on to you.
No matter how many times these breaches happen, we won't "evolve" a response because there are big financial companies whose profits rely on accumulating and easily accessing our credit files. Those companies will use their lobbying might to kill any reform bills that even slightly smell like they might slightly inconvenience them in the pursuit of protecting people. They might allow some useless "feel good" legislation to pass, but you can be sure they won't let any consumer protections "evolve" because that would mean less profits. So what if 15 million more people become identity theft victims? They can just write off the credit monitoring service they "generously" provide and that's the end of that. (For them. For the 15 million people, the pain is just starting.)
Don't forget that you need to pay each of the three major credit agencies. Also, if you're married and applying for a loan, your spouse and you need to pay separately. If my wife and I want to thaw our credit, it costs us $30. Awhile back there was a bill in Congress that would have made it free to freeze your credit, but the credit agencies, credit card companies, etc all lobbied against it. They see frozen credit as lowered profits (since you can't open new lines of credit on a whim). The rash of identity theft, to them, is just a corporate write-off at worst.
As an identity theft victim, let me say that "no credit card or banking data was stolen" means nothing. With name, address, SSN, and birth date compromised (as well as driver's license and passport numbers), anyone can now open new lines of credit in the names of any of the 15 million people whose information was accessed. And the two years of "credit monitoring" will do almost nothing. Fraud alerts won't either - those are voluntary.
My recommendation if you are one of the 15 million people is to freeze your credit. This will stop ANYONE from opening a new line of credit under your name unless you first thaw your credit file. It's a royal pain in the rear when you need to do things like refinance a loan, but it's better than having a collections agency banging down your door because you owe $5,000 on a credit card that "you" opened.
And how are they verifying the phone numbers are accurate? Via text messages? If so, then either they are sending unsolicited text messages (i.e. spam) or they are sending text messages to what might be the wrong phone numbers. In the latter case, the text message might go to a phone controlled by the review submitter who will approve the review despite not being the person the review is about.
This sounds like it'll be totally useless at best and a source of libel at worst.
From the Washington Post article:
To join the service – which is being beta tested – you must be at least 21 and have an established Facebook account. All reviews you write appear under your real name, and are contextualised in one of three categories: personal, professional or romantic. You can improve your public “positivity rating” by writing more positive reviews than negative ones.
I guess the "established Facebook account" is supposed to keep bots off of Peeple, but how long until someone uses compromised Facebook accounts to post reviews on Peeple?
To add someone to the database who has not been reviewed before, you must have that person’s cell phone number.
And how does Peeple verify this number? "I'd like to review Donald Trump. His mobile phone number is 212-867-5309." Is Peeple going to be placing calls "Hey, someone said you are PERSON'S NAME. Can you verify this for us?" Or will it just accept any mobile phone number as valid?
Positive ratings post immediately; negative ratings are queued in a private inbox for 48 hours in case of disputes. If you haven’t registered for the site, and thus can’t contest those negative ratings, your profile only shows positive reviews.
So if I don't register for the site, then only positive comments about me get posted but if I register the negative ones get posted too? What's the incentive to register? Why not just stay unregistered and tout that 100% positive rating on Peeple?
I still buy my kids console games: Most recently Super Mario Maker and Disney Infinity 3.0. (Though they spent their own money on the former and the latter is being held as a Chanukah present.) However, most of our game acquisitions are for Android devices.
As a bonus, if I buy a $1.99 Android game, my kids can play it on each of their tablets while my wife and I play it on our phones. One purchase = 4 installs. (Could even be more, but that's how many devices we have.) If we buy a $60 console game, it can only be played by one person/group of people (depending on if it is multiplayer) in one location (we only have one console) at a time. It's not portable either so while we can take the tablets/phones on a long car trip, the expensive console game will be left at home with the WiiU.
If there's any correlation between a person's race and intelligence, my guess would be it would be actually due to socioeconomic status and not genes. If a group of people are forced into poverty and lower quality education due to racism, those people will display "lower intelligence" (really, just not educated as well as the rich majority race who can send their kids to all the right schools). This will then be used as "proof" by the racists that DISCRIMINATED_AGAINST_RACE is actually less intelligent than MAJORITY_RACE. Of course, once you adjust for socioeconomic status, these differences vanish, but that's just adding facts which isn't allowed in a racists' argument. (At most, they allow half-truths - things that might be partially true in some circumstances but are twisted completely out of context to fit the racist argument.)
Price is definitely a big factor. If my boys want a new console game, it will cost me around $60. A new tablet game, though, is usually under $1.99 if not totally free. I could buy my boys a new tablet game every two weeks for an entire year for less than the cost of one console game.
I've long thought this could be the case. First, you'd have the communication be in an alien language. We're not just talking a foreign language, like Spanish, that has the same (or nearly the same) alphabet as English or even a language, like Russian or Hebrew, that has a completely different alphabet. Those languages were still made by humans. We'd be talking about a language formed by a completely different creature that evolved in a completely different environment.
After this, you'd have the communication encoded in an alien codec. I guarantee that a hypothetical alien wouldn't be communicating video conversations in H.264 or audio communications using FLAC. Imagine if you had never seen an MP3 file before (or MP4 or any related codec) and didn't have any pre-written tools to play it. Would you be able to decipher an audio file encoded as an MP3? Now take that example and substitute a codec made by someone who is literally not of this Earth.
Finally, take that message in an alien language using an alien codec and compress it using a schema that (again) was devised by aliens. This wouldn't be gzip, but something totally different. Given how different all of this would be from anything we've ever seen before, what chance would we have of identifying it as an alien communication and not a random burst of electromagnetic radiation? (There's also the question of whether aliens would be using electromagnetic radiation instead of some other, more advanced form of communication, but that's a different story entirely.)
That's one reason why I thought that Google+'s circles was superior to the "Friends" label on Facebook. Sure, I can add my co-workers to the "Co-Workers" circle and show them only work-appropriate posts. Meanwhile, my friends can get the NSFW posts.
Of course, Google+ messed it up with their real name policy. My primary social media network is Twitter where I can use a pseudonym and not get my account revoked for not using my real name. (And yes, I'm aware that my Slashdot account uses my real name. This account dates back to when I didn't care if my real name was out there and I don't feel like starting over with a new account.)
The amount that we'd bring back to Earth would be insignificant. The global shipping weight is about 1.4 * 10^6 kg (Source). The weight of the Earth is 5.972 * 10^24 kg. If we assumed that we brought the entire global shipping weight from asteroids to Earth annually, it would take 42 billion years before we brought even one millionth of one percent of the Earth's current mass. I think, at that point, we would have bigger problems than simply "we're making the Earth too heavy."
Or, more likely, they just act stupid and it's not documented. How many instances of "sure, I can do this" end up in injury, don't involve cameras at all, and thus don't wind up "going viral"?
You know, my fear is these people would be just as stupid without the camera.
I've got to agree. How many people die from similar stupid stunts minus the camera aimed at them? The running of the bulls one seemed highly dangerous but easily documented so I checked and found this article that said 7 people were killed at running of the bulls ceremonies in a one month period. I'm guessing one might be our selfie-taker but what about the other 6 then?
I'm not saying that selfies aren't stupid at times. That guy who whipped out a selfie stick on a Disney World roller coaster ride was just asking to hurt someone. (Great work on Disney's part to shut down the ride quickly and confiscate the stick.) There are times when selfies are harmless. I've taken them from time to time. But, like any other activity, you need to be aware of where you are and what your safety margin is. If I was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, you can bet I wouldn't be leaning over to get a better selfie shot. But when I was in a pool with my kids during a recent cruise (with my phone in a protective water-proof casing) without my wife nearby to take photos? I took a few selfies with my kids along with photos of just my kids. (I also had fun with my kids without involving photography, but I enjoy taking photos.)
I don't even find governments trying to weasel around this fact. They blatently ignore it. Even if we assumed that a LAW_ENFORCEMENT_ONLY backdoor provided to LAW_ENFORCEMENT_ORGANIZATION_X would never be abused by said organization, it would only be a matter of time before the backdoor was found and abused by someone else - someone who could pretend to be from LAW_ENFORCEMENT_ORGANIZATION_X.
It's about the same as my policy on governmental powers: Even if you could guarantee that $AdministrationX would hold to its promise to never abuse $GovernmentPowerY, you couldn't guarantee the same about the next administration or the one after that. Eventually, any power will be abused by someone. That's why the US's founding fathers built checks and balances into their system - because they didn't trust any one person/group to be corruption-free. It's definitely not a perfect system, but checks and balances/accountability should be built into any system where a person is being granted great power.
There are way too many people who think that the only way to win against "terrorists who want to destroy our democracy" is to destroy our democracy ourselves. I'll grant that this would stop terrorists from being able to destroy our democracy (because we destroyed it first), but I wouldn't call it winning. Not knee-jerk reacting in fear of every possible shadow would be winning since terrorists - by definition - want to cause fear in their enemies. If we shrugged our shoulders at them, took some small, common sense, non-invasive security measures (e.g. locked and reinforced cockpit cabin doors), and then didn't let ourselves live in fear of them... THEN I'd call it winning.
Not to mention all of your spam e-mails that you looked at via HTTPS webmail. Because if you don't keep an unencrypted copy of "herbal viagra for sale by nigerian princes whose daughters want to video chat with you" for 90 days then you're breaking the law!
The problem, though, that even the 90 day limit is too much to require. Suppose you go to check your Gmail account. You've accessed it via HTTPS which means it's encrypted which means you now need to keep unencrypted versions of all of your e-mails for 90 days. Yes, even that Nigerian prince e-mail that you immediately went to delete as spam. First, you must save it without encryption and only then can you delete it. This will either a) make using any form of encryption too much of a hassle thus leaving communications open for "security agencies" to look through or b) will result in mass violation of the law which means anyone who runs afoul of the wrong official can be jailed for failing to keep unencrypted copies.
Get used to it guys. We don't live in the safe, lily-white world of yesterday where innocent pranks can just be ignored. Today's post 9/11 world is a dangerous one, where terrorist evildoers looking to exploit and destroy the free society we have. I sympathize with the innocent kids like Ahmed, but his situation is a small price to pay for waging the war on terrorism. I'm ok with a few innocent people being inconvenienced for my safety and my family's safety.
What's that quote about trading freedom for security again?
Seriously, though. How many terrorist attacks have there been in the US since 9/11? We've turned into a nation that jumps at our own shadow and that lets political leaders exploit our fears for their own gain. ("Only the TRX-9000 can stop airport terrorist attacks so we need to buy a million units. Nobody look to see the kickbacks I'm getting from sales of the TRX-9000." "If you vote for my opponent he'll let the terrorists kill your kids. You don't want the terrorists to kill your kids, do you? Vote for me.")
Freedom means that we'll always have some risk of terrorist attacks. When I go to the mall, what assurance do I have that some terrorist isn't walking in with a bomb? After all, I'm freely walking into the public location. Maybe we need TSA-level security at every mall entrance and exit. And at every public park. And at the entrance to each and every major city. (Have you and your completely searched to enter/exit a city.) And why stop at cities? Every town, building, and other location could have TSA-level security as well to "protect us from terrorists."
Sure, we won't be able to walk anywhere without presenting papers proving that we are good citizens, but destroying our freedom ourselves is a small price to pay for keeping terrorists from destroying our freedom, right?
(For the record, in case the AC thinks this is a great idea, that was massive sarcasm.)
You do realise that he wasn't invited because of his accomplishment, but as a message to encourage people to carry on tinkering even in the face of authoritarian dullards?
Exactly this. Let's say that Ahmed's story ended with his arrest and release. No White House invite or national social media attention. Let's also say that his clock project wasn't even that impressive. He had shown interest in taking things apart, seeing how they work, and putting them back together again. That's at least the first step towards actually building something himself.
Post-arrest, however, he would be reluctant to do this again. Taking things apart and seeing how they work could be associated in his mind with getting in serious trouble so he might think it's better to just buy everything his needs pre-packaged and stop trying to figure out how things work. This wouldn't be a good outcome. Maybe he'll never be a great engineer. Maybe he'll never even be a mediocre one. However, he deserves the chance to test out the limits of his abilities without some school administrators and police freaking out because "wires equals Hollywood-style bomb so this must be dangerous."
Moreover, once his story DID get massive attention, how many kids would have been discouraged from exploring simply because they knew Ahmed got in trouble? Better to end his story on a positive note (trip to the White House/NASA/etc) than on a negative note (hauled off to jail for building a "bomb"). The response to his story isn't a reaction to his skill but to his potential and to the negative reaction to someone who had been exploring on his own.
When my wife and I were first looking to have a child, we didn't think we could afford one so we waited a bit. And then a bit more. Eventually, we realized that we'd never be 100% financially ready for a child. So we had our child (and then our second child) and we managed our budget. It meant cutting out some things we might have wanted to do otherwise, but we juggled the available funds to cover our costs.
Most people aren't going to be set for life before they have children. Are there people who are irresponsible and have a ton of children that are impossible for them to support? Sure. But most middle-class people aren't 100% financially set - even if they lose their jobs. Requiring that before they have kids would mean that nobody but the wealthy would have kids.
As far as the "lost your legs, etc" argument goes, it happens more often than you'd think. Not losing your legs, but losing your job and being unable to find a new one. And while you are looking, you are draining your bank dry and then sinking deeper and deeper into debt. At some point, even getting a job (any job) won't get you out of debt as more piles on faster than you can pay it off - even if you are trying to be fiscally responsible. If you lose your house as well during this rough patch, it can add a "homeless" stigma that makes it harder to get a job and thus harder to dig yourself out of the mounting debt.
I've been lucky. While money is tight, we still have enough for necessities and some luxuries. However, I'm always aware that this could change quickly and has for too many other people.
Or maybe some people have kids and then things turn south? If I lost my job and I spent my savings while looking for a new one, I wouldn't be able to just give away my kids because I couldn't afford them anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I talk to my father about my identity theft and subsequent credit freeze, he tells me I should just change my SSN. Apparently, you *can* do that. However, it's not an easy process and I'd need to contact anyone who legitimately* has my SSN to update that. Once again, a criminal can do damage in one hour that the victim will be cleaning up for years.
* SSNs shouldn't be used as unique identifiers at all so read "legitimately" to mean "they shouldn't need it, it shouldn't be a unique identifier, but the system is set up to require it and good luck trying to force them to change."
I'm an identity theft victim, albeit a lucky one who caught it early before too much damage was done, and it was scary when someone opened a credit card in my name. What's scarier, though, is if a criminal is arrested and gives your name/SSN/DOB. I used to read the blog of someone who was going through just that. He was fired from his job because he failed a background check, couldn't find a new job, and had police stalk him because they considered him a criminal (despite the fact that "his" mugshot looked nothing like him). Even when he got one department to remove his "conviction" from their records, it just flowed back from another police database. It took years before anyone would listen and years more before he started to make any real progress.
Unfortunately, you can't stop this with a simple credit freeze like you can stop normal identity theft. In fact, there's no way to stop this at all. Any criminal with your name/SSN/DOB could give that information when they are arrested and pass their arrest record on to you.
No matter how many times these breaches happen, we won't "evolve" a response because there are big financial companies whose profits rely on accumulating and easily accessing our credit files. Those companies will use their lobbying might to kill any reform bills that even slightly smell like they might slightly inconvenience them in the pursuit of protecting people. They might allow some useless "feel good" legislation to pass, but you can be sure they won't let any consumer protections "evolve" because that would mean less profits. So what if 15 million more people become identity theft victims? They can just write off the credit monitoring service they "generously" provide and that's the end of that. (For them. For the 15 million people, the pain is just starting.)
Don't forget that you need to pay each of the three major credit agencies. Also, if you're married and applying for a loan, your spouse and you need to pay separately. If my wife and I want to thaw our credit, it costs us $30. Awhile back there was a bill in Congress that would have made it free to freeze your credit, but the credit agencies, credit card companies, etc all lobbied against it. They see frozen credit as lowered profits (since you can't open new lines of credit on a whim). The rash of identity theft, to them, is just a corporate write-off at worst.
As an identity theft victim, let me say that "no credit card or banking data was stolen" means nothing. With name, address, SSN, and birth date compromised (as well as driver's license and passport numbers), anyone can now open new lines of credit in the names of any of the 15 million people whose information was accessed. And the two years of "credit monitoring" will do almost nothing. Fraud alerts won't either - those are voluntary.
My recommendation if you are one of the 15 million people is to freeze your credit. This will stop ANYONE from opening a new line of credit under your name unless you first thaw your credit file. It's a royal pain in the rear when you need to do things like refinance a loan, but it's better than having a collections agency banging down your door because you owe $5,000 on a credit card that "you" opened.
And how are they verifying the phone numbers are accurate? Via text messages? If so, then either they are sending unsolicited text messages (i.e. spam) or they are sending text messages to what might be the wrong phone numbers. In the latter case, the text message might go to a phone controlled by the review submitter who will approve the review despite not being the person the review is about.
This sounds like it'll be totally useless at best and a source of libel at worst.
From the Washington Post article:
I guess the "established Facebook account" is supposed to keep bots off of Peeple, but how long until someone uses compromised Facebook accounts to post reviews on Peeple?
And how does Peeple verify this number? "I'd like to review Donald Trump. His mobile phone number is 212-867-5309." Is Peeple going to be placing calls "Hey, someone said you are PERSON'S NAME. Can you verify this for us?" Or will it just accept any mobile phone number as valid?
So if I don't register for the site, then only positive comments about me get posted but if I register the negative ones get posted too? What's the incentive to register? Why not just stay unregistered and tout that 100% positive rating on Peeple?
I still buy my kids console games: Most recently Super Mario Maker and Disney Infinity 3.0. (Though they spent their own money on the former and the latter is being held as a Chanukah present.) However, most of our game acquisitions are for Android devices.
As a bonus, if I buy a $1.99 Android game, my kids can play it on each of their tablets while my wife and I play it on our phones. One purchase = 4 installs. (Could even be more, but that's how many devices we have.) If we buy a $60 console game, it can only be played by one person/group of people (depending on if it is multiplayer) in one location (we only have one console) at a time. It's not portable either so while we can take the tablets/phones on a long car trip, the expensive console game will be left at home with the WiiU.
If there's any correlation between a person's race and intelligence, my guess would be it would be actually due to socioeconomic status and not genes. If a group of people are forced into poverty and lower quality education due to racism, those people will display "lower intelligence" (really, just not educated as well as the rich majority race who can send their kids to all the right schools). This will then be used as "proof" by the racists that DISCRIMINATED_AGAINST_RACE is actually less intelligent than MAJORITY_RACE. Of course, once you adjust for socioeconomic status, these differences vanish, but that's just adding facts which isn't allowed in a racists' argument. (At most, they allow half-truths - things that might be partially true in some circumstances but are twisted completely out of context to fit the racist argument.)
Price is definitely a big factor. If my boys want a new console game, it will cost me around $60. A new tablet game, though, is usually under $1.99 if not totally free. I could buy my boys a new tablet game every two weeks for an entire year for less than the cost of one console game.
I've long thought this could be the case. First, you'd have the communication be in an alien language. We're not just talking a foreign language, like Spanish, that has the same (or nearly the same) alphabet as English or even a language, like Russian or Hebrew, that has a completely different alphabet. Those languages were still made by humans. We'd be talking about a language formed by a completely different creature that evolved in a completely different environment.
After this, you'd have the communication encoded in an alien codec. I guarantee that a hypothetical alien wouldn't be communicating video conversations in H.264 or audio communications using FLAC. Imagine if you had never seen an MP3 file before (or MP4 or any related codec) and didn't have any pre-written tools to play it. Would you be able to decipher an audio file encoded as an MP3? Now take that example and substitute a codec made by someone who is literally not of this Earth.
Finally, take that message in an alien language using an alien codec and compress it using a schema that (again) was devised by aliens. This wouldn't be gzip, but something totally different. Given how different all of this would be from anything we've ever seen before, what chance would we have of identifying it as an alien communication and not a random burst of electromagnetic radiation? (There's also the question of whether aliens would be using electromagnetic radiation instead of some other, more advanced form of communication, but that's a different story entirely.)
That's one reason why I thought that Google+'s circles was superior to the "Friends" label on Facebook. Sure, I can add my co-workers to the "Co-Workers" circle and show them only work-appropriate posts. Meanwhile, my friends can get the NSFW posts.
Of course, Google+ messed it up with their real name policy. My primary social media network is Twitter where I can use a pseudonym and not get my account revoked for not using my real name. (And yes, I'm aware that my Slashdot account uses my real name. This account dates back to when I didn't care if my real name was out there and I don't feel like starting over with a new account.)
I don't even use Facebook so I bully as many people as possible at once!
The amount that we'd bring back to Earth would be insignificant. The global shipping weight is about 1.4 * 10^6 kg (Source). The weight of the Earth is 5.972 * 10^24 kg. If we assumed that we brought the entire global shipping weight from asteroids to Earth annually, it would take 42 billion years before we brought even one millionth of one percent of the Earth's current mass. I think, at that point, we would have bigger problems than simply "we're making the Earth too heavy."
Or, more likely, they just act stupid and it's not documented. How many instances of "sure, I can do this" end up in injury, don't involve cameras at all, and thus don't wind up "going viral"?
I've got to agree. How many people die from similar stupid stunts minus the camera aimed at them? The running of the bulls one seemed highly dangerous but easily documented so I checked and found this article that said 7 people were killed at running of the bulls ceremonies in a one month period. I'm guessing one might be our selfie-taker but what about the other 6 then?
I'm not saying that selfies aren't stupid at times. That guy who whipped out a selfie stick on a Disney World roller coaster ride was just asking to hurt someone. (Great work on Disney's part to shut down the ride quickly and confiscate the stick.) There are times when selfies are harmless. I've taken them from time to time. But, like any other activity, you need to be aware of where you are and what your safety margin is. If I was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, you can bet I wouldn't be leaning over to get a better selfie shot. But when I was in a pool with my kids during a recent cruise (with my phone in a protective water-proof casing) without my wife nearby to take photos? I took a few selfies with my kids along with photos of just my kids. (I also had fun with my kids without involving photography, but I enjoy taking photos.)
I don't even find governments trying to weasel around this fact. They blatently ignore it. Even if we assumed that a LAW_ENFORCEMENT_ONLY backdoor provided to LAW_ENFORCEMENT_ORGANIZATION_X would never be abused by said organization, it would only be a matter of time before the backdoor was found and abused by someone else - someone who could pretend to be from LAW_ENFORCEMENT_ORGANIZATION_X.
It's about the same as my policy on governmental powers: Even if you could guarantee that $AdministrationX would hold to its promise to never abuse $GovernmentPowerY, you couldn't guarantee the same about the next administration or the one after that. Eventually, any power will be abused by someone. That's why the US's founding fathers built checks and balances into their system - because they didn't trust any one person/group to be corruption-free. It's definitely not a perfect system, but checks and balances/accountability should be built into any system where a person is being granted great power.
There are way too many people who think that the only way to win against "terrorists who want to destroy our democracy" is to destroy our democracy ourselves. I'll grant that this would stop terrorists from being able to destroy our democracy (because we destroyed it first), but I wouldn't call it winning. Not knee-jerk reacting in fear of every possible shadow would be winning since terrorists - by definition - want to cause fear in their enemies. If we shrugged our shoulders at them, took some small, common sense, non-invasive security measures (e.g. locked and reinforced cockpit cabin doors), and then didn't let ourselves live in fear of them... THEN I'd call it winning.
Not to mention all of your spam e-mails that you looked at via HTTPS webmail. Because if you don't keep an unencrypted copy of "herbal viagra for sale by nigerian princes whose daughters want to video chat with you" for 90 days then you're breaking the law!
The problem, though, that even the 90 day limit is too much to require. Suppose you go to check your Gmail account. You've accessed it via HTTPS which means it's encrypted which means you now need to keep unencrypted versions of all of your e-mails for 90 days. Yes, even that Nigerian prince e-mail that you immediately went to delete as spam. First, you must save it without encryption and only then can you delete it. This will either a) make using any form of encryption too much of a hassle thus leaving communications open for "security agencies" to look through or b) will result in mass violation of the law which means anyone who runs afoul of the wrong official can be jailed for failing to keep unencrypted copies.
What's that quote about trading freedom for security again?
Seriously, though. How many terrorist attacks have there been in the US since 9/11? We've turned into a nation that jumps at our own shadow and that lets political leaders exploit our fears for their own gain. ("Only the TRX-9000 can stop airport terrorist attacks so we need to buy a million units. Nobody look to see the kickbacks I'm getting from sales of the TRX-9000." "If you vote for my opponent he'll let the terrorists kill your kids. You don't want the terrorists to kill your kids, do you? Vote for me.")
Freedom means that we'll always have some risk of terrorist attacks. When I go to the mall, what assurance do I have that some terrorist isn't walking in with a bomb? After all, I'm freely walking into the public location. Maybe we need TSA-level security at every mall entrance and exit. And at every public park. And at the entrance to each and every major city. (Have you and your completely searched to enter/exit a city.) And why stop at cities? Every town, building, and other location could have TSA-level security as well to "protect us from terrorists."
Sure, we won't be able to walk anywhere without presenting papers proving that we are good citizens, but destroying our freedom ourselves is a small price to pay for keeping terrorists from destroying our freedom, right?
(For the record, in case the AC thinks this is a great idea, that was massive sarcasm.)
Exactly this. Let's say that Ahmed's story ended with his arrest and release. No White House invite or national social media attention. Let's also say that his clock project wasn't even that impressive. He had shown interest in taking things apart, seeing how they work, and putting them back together again. That's at least the first step towards actually building something himself.
Post-arrest, however, he would be reluctant to do this again. Taking things apart and seeing how they work could be associated in his mind with getting in serious trouble so he might think it's better to just buy everything his needs pre-packaged and stop trying to figure out how things work. This wouldn't be a good outcome. Maybe he'll never be a great engineer. Maybe he'll never even be a mediocre one. However, he deserves the chance to test out the limits of his abilities without some school administrators and police freaking out because "wires equals Hollywood-style bomb so this must be dangerous."
Moreover, once his story DID get massive attention, how many kids would have been discouraged from exploring simply because they knew Ahmed got in trouble? Better to end his story on a positive note (trip to the White House/NASA/etc) than on a negative note (hauled off to jail for building a "bomb"). The response to his story isn't a reaction to his skill but to his potential and to the negative reaction to someone who had been exploring on his own.
When my wife and I were first looking to have a child, we didn't think we could afford one so we waited a bit. And then a bit more. Eventually, we realized that we'd never be 100% financially ready for a child. So we had our child (and then our second child) and we managed our budget. It meant cutting out some things we might have wanted to do otherwise, but we juggled the available funds to cover our costs.
Most people aren't going to be set for life before they have children. Are there people who are irresponsible and have a ton of children that are impossible for them to support? Sure. But most middle-class people aren't 100% financially set - even if they lose their jobs. Requiring that before they have kids would mean that nobody but the wealthy would have kids.
As far as the "lost your legs, etc" argument goes, it happens more often than you'd think. Not losing your legs, but losing your job and being unable to find a new one. And while you are looking, you are draining your bank dry and then sinking deeper and deeper into debt. At some point, even getting a job (any job) won't get you out of debt as more piles on faster than you can pay it off - even if you are trying to be fiscally responsible. If you lose your house as well during this rough patch, it can add a "homeless" stigma that makes it harder to get a job and thus harder to dig yourself out of the mounting debt.
I've been lucky. While money is tight, we still have enough for necessities and some luxuries. However, I'm always aware that this could change quickly and has for too many other people.
Or maybe some people have kids and then things turn south? If I lost my job and I spent my savings while looking for a new one, I wouldn't be able to just give away my kids because I couldn't afford them anymore.
Three post-it notes on a wall:
Post-it Note #1: "This post-it note isn't a bomb."
Post-it Note #2: "Neither is this post-it note."
Third post-it note left blank.
How much panic is induced and what would the charges look like for sticking three post-it notes on a wall?