The Whistleblower Act will be no protection whatsoever. For that to work, the program he disclosed would have to be found illegal. Given that the Supreme Court won't even summon the balls to agree to hear a case about far-more-egregrious warrantless wiretapping, the likelihood of the program he disclosed being found unconstitutional is approx. zero.
Without a ruling that the program was illegal, he puts himself firmly under the jurisdiction of the Espionage Act, and his confession makes a chance of conviction approx. 100%.
If the government wanted somebody to publicly demonize, don't you think they'd plant somebody who gave the appearance of being a mentally unstable loon? Or maybe somebody talking about what a noble cause Al-Qaeda is fighting for?
In any case, RTFA. As the original source, the Guardian interviewed him BEFORE the leaks were public, not after. They weren't just anonymously stuck under the Guardian's door, and now he's come out of the woodwork to confess.
He is a far better (and more effective) patriot than Bradley Manning; definitely more like Daniel Ellsberg.
Manning (and Wikileaks) dumped a huge pile of classified information on the internet with little regard to the consequences of their actions. Material that any thinking observer would regard as quite sensibly classified, and discussing no sort of malfeasance or wrongdoing, was revealed. This gave the government ample cover to prosecute Manning with little fear of popular outrage. Real (and innocent) people had their lives hurt (and probably ended) by Manning's leaks. He's essentially getting tried for treason, and the government has ample reason to do so. The fact that he was motivated by moral outrage isn't really relevant, as much of the information he revealed had nothing whatsoever to do with the things he was unhappy about. (And Assange going on an ego trip didn't help.)
This man, on the other hand, copied a very specific and small set of documents revealing something that every thinking citizen does indeed have a right to be angry about. He put nobody in danger (unless you subscribe to the "If the all-seeing-eye doesn't know everything, the terrorists win." school of thought.) The documents he revealed are all directly associated with what he's unhappy with. No actual investigation details (current or past) have been revealed, no names are mentioned, and he's neither hiding nor chasing the spotlight.
He appears to be a principled and thoughtful patriot, and I think despite their best efforts, they'll have a tough time demonizing him for the public, although it won't be for lack of trying. If they do capture him and put on trial, and he will almost certainly lose. Despite him doing the right thing for the right reasons, this is not a strange or ambiguous application of the Espionage Act. His only hope would be for a successful court challenge to the programs he has disclosed, but given the current proclivities of the Supreme Court, that is unlikely, to say the least.
While it will be little comfort, I believe history will vindicate him.
What the hell kind of a "review" was that? It seemed like most of the review was spent moaning about how evil Google is. Whether it is or isn't is kind of beside the point; it's a Google ad not-so-cleverly disguised as a lame comedy, not a documentary or expose on corporate America. Movie reviews are supposed to be about the movie, not about the particular bones the review author would like to pick.
Whoa! Stop the presses!!! You mean to tell me that countries that are nominally allies sometimes carry out covert intelligence operations against each other?
If this comes as a shock to anybody, anywhere, you need to crawl out from under the proverbial rock. It happens all. the. time.
And "a link to a website in Turkey" is hardly proof of anything. At all. And if it came from a GMail account, would there be dark aspersions that Google was behind it all?
I don't see why the iPhone wouldn't use matrix metering. It's trivial to implement, the algorithms should be available for low cost from just about any camera company if they don't care to write their own.
In all fairness, there are plenty of wingnuts that view the existence of liberals as treasonous. And there certainly isn't any shortage of ethically bankrupt "journalism" on either side.
Recording is only illegal if there was a reasonable expectation of privacy. Two neighbors arguing on their front lawn have none. You can record them and play it back on the evening news if you so choose. Two neighbors arguing in their living room? A grey area if they are being loud and you do so from the street. Only illegal if you, for instance, have to put a mic on the glass.
One of Slashdot's weaknesses is the lack of an "edit" button. Most sites have them these days... It'd be even better if they had one with a link to the original comment, to prevent all sorts of trollish foolishness.
I apologize; you are correct. I should have read all the linked articles. It's a grey area that the law will have to sort out. (I suspect it hinges on if he would have been considered trespassing at the time, and if the participants in the recorded meeting had a reasonable expectation of privacy.)
What he did was neither ethical, legal, or even a remotely good idea. Even if your opponent is a prick. I cannot imagine in what universe he is inhabiting that he thinks that this was not going to get him in serious trouble (as well it should.) And under what journalistic ethical code is bugging somebody's office allowed?
I'm no fan of Julian Assange (not because I think that wikileaks is illegal or immoral, rather because the way he handles it, and himself, is really poor...) but this isn't even remotely similar. The only inspiration he could have possibly drawn from Julian is a gigantic ego.
Unless set for spot or center, modern AE algorithms are little more sophisticated than "Expose the whole scene for 18% grey." "Matrix" metering has been around for something like 25 years now. Matrix metering tries to recognize what you are trying to accomplish and adjust exposure accordingly. You are correct that it doesn't always get it right, but give them a little credit... I find that when I'm using my modern DSLR, AE gets it perfect most of the time, and produces a usable shot (as in, one salvageable for a website or newsprint) almost all the time.
"Fund my defense in return for me not suing you about my worthless patent" doesn't make you any less of a troll than "Pay me money in return for me not suing you about my worthless patent."
While you can't arrest everyone on the block if somebody smokes weed, if your apartment building is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, don't be surprised if you lose your landlord permit. And yes, perfectly innocent tenants get thrown out when that happens.
I am arguing nothing of the sort. Instead, I'm arguing that if you want to have multiple users share the same IP address, you need to be prepared to find, and shut, individual users if informed of wrongdoing. If you ignore such requests, you shouldn't be surprised if you get spanked for it.
Basically, a community college cheaped-out on it's webhost, and it was sharing a single IP with 1,200 other sites. It is certainly not out of the realm of possibilities that one of those 1,200 was doing something naughty (malware, DDOS, spam, kiddie porn, who knows?), and CheapBastardWebhosting was apathetic when informed about it. Just like any harmful of blatantly illegal site, the next step is a block of the IP.
The block was lifted after the outcry, but I suspect that was more because the block got the webhosts attention and they then properly booted the naughty customer.
EFF, please don't Greenpeace or PETA yourselves with silly crap like this. (This wouldn't be the first time their press releases have stretched or misinterpreted facts more than a bit.)
Yes, Mt. Gox had some anti-money-laundering measures in place. But the legal requirements go far beyond merely verifying the legal identities of your customers, which is all that page covers. (If that was all KYC involved, banks would not need entire large departments dedicated to that function.)
For a small customer like yourself, nothing more than ID is required, which you've supplied. Once you start moving decent amounts of cash, the institution receiving the money is required to know something about the activities the cash came from. It doesn't matter that the currency was BitCoins; the same rules still apply. There are reports to file, records to keep, etc. For instance, a bank is expected to report activities like a hot dog cart suddenly depositing stacks of $20's well out of proportion to a plausible amount of sales.
Not complying with these rules (which is "Financial Institution Regulatory Framework 101") is not going to end well.
Mt. Gox was a shoestring operation that got in WAY over its head. (As in, actual banks have entire departments of employees dedicated to pretending to comply with these kinds of rules, warehouses (or tape libraries) full of documents stored away, etc.)
The likelihood that Mt Gox was complying with the "Know Your Customer" anti-money-laundering rules that apply to all financial institutions that handle currency was approx. zero. I'm not surprised in the least. If a bank was doing what Mt. Gox was, (as in, not even pretending to comply with the law), the same thing would happen.
(That's not to say that disobedience of money laundering never occurs, just that experienced banks are substantially better at hiding it.)
Given that the patent office is self-funded, and rejections only make more time-consuming work, it'd be silly for some Machiavellian Patent Office executive to hand out incentives for rejecting patents.
Correct... banks do not like to deal in large cash volumes (it's expensive, for starters.) However, those businesses for which it makes sense to have a large cash intake still do have access to the banking industry, although a closer eye is kept on them than customers that don't move large cash volumes.
A bank providing services to a BitCoin exchange? Neither the bank nor the exchange has any flipping clue where the BitCoins came from, and unless the exchange sets up a mechanism to find out, then yes, the bank is going to drop the exchange for fear of running afoul of Know Your Customer rules. A few large cash transactions running through the exchange and a whole lot of "I dunno" answers leads to all sorts of uncomfortable meetings with regulators.
Banks don't hate BitCoins (or gold) because it's non-fiduciary... it's because it's a Pain In The Ass to deal with. Banks are more than happy to let an independent entity (as in, not them) deal with BitCoin transfers and storage if they so choose. Agreeing to accept deposits in BitCoins (which due to their volatility are currently utterly incompatible with fractional reserve banking) is a task that would earn them only tiny transaction fees... it's simply not worth the bother.
I suspect it was Transaction Reporting requirements, along with Know Your Customer regulations that did them in. The government doesn't care if you are shoveling Benjamins, BitCoins, Euros, Pesos, or British Pounds, across the counter or over the wire... if you want to trade in heavy quantities of Cash or Cash Equivalents, you have to comply with money laundering laws. If their bank felt they could not keep the account open and still comply with those laws... ker-chop!
Did the fact that BitCoins were being traded have something to do with it? You bet. But they would have been equally eager to shut down an operation dealing with physical currency and numbered accounts... they don't like anonymiity combined with large volumes of untracable cash.
The money supply does not have a direct relationship to GDP. A high-velocity currency (one that trades hands frequently instead of being stored) will have a low value in relation to GDP. A low-velocity currency would behave the opposite.
When reporting the size of the money supply, you will see references to M0, M1, MB, and M2. They are different ways of measuring the supply and are used for different purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
The Whistleblower Act will be no protection whatsoever. For that to work, the program he disclosed would have to be found illegal. Given that the Supreme Court won't even summon the balls to agree to hear a case about far-more-egregrious warrantless wiretapping, the likelihood of the program he disclosed being found unconstitutional is approx. zero.
Without a ruling that the program was illegal, he puts himself firmly under the jurisdiction of the Espionage Act, and his confession makes a chance of conviction approx. 100%.
If the government wanted somebody to publicly demonize, don't you think they'd plant somebody who gave the appearance of being a mentally unstable loon? Or maybe somebody talking about what a noble cause Al-Qaeda is fighting for?
In any case, RTFA. As the original source, the Guardian interviewed him BEFORE the leaks were public, not after. They weren't just anonymously stuck under the Guardian's door, and now he's come out of the woodwork to confess.
Yes, it has occurred to Slashdot that this "[limits] our government's ability to challenge people who wish us ill".
We've traded that ability in return for trying to limit the actions of a government that, in this case, wishes its citizens ill.
A government that thinks nothing of stripping liberties in the name of security is a far greater threat to our freedom than "Islamist hordes".
He is a far better (and more effective) patriot than Bradley Manning; definitely more like Daniel Ellsberg.
Manning (and Wikileaks) dumped a huge pile of classified information on the internet with little regard to the consequences of their actions. Material that any thinking observer would regard as quite sensibly classified, and discussing no sort of malfeasance or wrongdoing, was revealed. This gave the government ample cover to prosecute Manning with little fear of popular outrage. Real (and innocent) people had their lives hurt (and probably ended) by Manning's leaks. He's essentially getting tried for treason, and the government has ample reason to do so. The fact that he was motivated by moral outrage isn't really relevant, as much of the information he revealed had nothing whatsoever to do with the things he was unhappy about. (And Assange going on an ego trip didn't help.)
This man, on the other hand, copied a very specific and small set of documents revealing something that every thinking citizen does indeed have a right to be angry about. He put nobody in danger (unless you subscribe to the "If the all-seeing-eye doesn't know everything, the terrorists win." school of thought.) The documents he revealed are all directly associated with what he's unhappy with. No actual investigation details (current or past) have been revealed, no names are mentioned, and he's neither hiding nor chasing the spotlight.
He appears to be a principled and thoughtful patriot, and I think despite their best efforts, they'll have a tough time demonizing him for the public, although it won't be for lack of trying. If they do capture him and put on trial, and he will almost certainly lose. Despite him doing the right thing for the right reasons, this is not a strange or ambiguous application of the Espionage Act. His only hope would be for a successful court challenge to the programs he has disclosed, but given the current proclivities of the Supreme Court, that is unlikely, to say the least.
While it will be little comfort, I believe history will vindicate him.
What the hell kind of a "review" was that? It seemed like most of the review was spent moaning about how evil Google is. Whether it is or isn't is kind of beside the point; it's a Google ad not-so-cleverly disguised as a lame comedy, not a documentary or expose on corporate America. Movie reviews are supposed to be about the movie, not about the particular bones the review author would like to pick.
Whoa! Stop the presses!!! You mean to tell me that countries that are nominally allies sometimes carry out covert intelligence operations against each other?
If this comes as a shock to anybody, anywhere, you need to crawl out from under the proverbial rock. It happens all. the. time.
And "a link to a website in Turkey" is hardly proof of anything. At all. And if it came from a GMail account, would there be dark aspersions that Google was behind it all?
I don't see why the iPhone wouldn't use matrix metering. It's trivial to implement, the algorithms should be available for low cost from just about any camera company if they don't care to write their own.
In all fairness, there are plenty of wingnuts that view the existence of liberals as treasonous. And there certainly isn't any shortage of ethically bankrupt "journalism" on either side.
Recording is only illegal if there was a reasonable expectation of privacy. Two neighbors arguing on their front lawn have none. You can record them and play it back on the evening news if you so choose. Two neighbors arguing in their living room? A grey area if they are being loud and you do so from the street. Only illegal if you, for instance, have to put a mic on the glass.
One of Slashdot's weaknesses is the lack of an "edit" button. Most sites have them these days... It'd be even better if they had one with a link to the original comment, to prevent all sorts of trollish foolishness.
I apologize; you are correct. I should have read all the linked articles. It's a grey area that the law will have to sort out. (I suspect it hinges on if he would have been considered trespassing at the time, and if the participants in the recorded meeting had a reasonable expectation of privacy.)
What he did was neither ethical, legal, or even a remotely good idea. Even if your opponent is a prick. I cannot imagine in what universe he is inhabiting that he thinks that this was not going to get him in serious trouble (as well it should.) And under what journalistic ethical code is bugging somebody's office allowed?
I'm no fan of Julian Assange (not because I think that wikileaks is illegal or immoral, rather because the way he handles it, and himself, is really poor...) but this isn't even remotely similar. The only inspiration he could have possibly drawn from Julian is a gigantic ego.
Unless set for spot or center, modern AE algorithms are little more sophisticated than "Expose the whole scene for 18% grey." "Matrix" metering has been around for something like 25 years now. Matrix metering tries to recognize what you are trying to accomplish and adjust exposure accordingly. You are correct that it doesn't always get it right, but give them a little credit... I find that when I'm using my modern DSLR, AE gets it perfect most of the time, and produces a usable shot (as in, one salvageable for a website or newsprint) almost all the time.
"Fund my defense in return for me not suing you about my worthless patent" doesn't make you any less of a troll than "Pay me money in return for me not suing you about my worthless patent."
While you can't arrest everyone on the block if somebody smokes weed, if your apartment building is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, don't be surprised if you lose your landlord permit. And yes, perfectly innocent tenants get thrown out when that happens.
I am arguing nothing of the sort. Instead, I'm arguing that if you want to have multiple users share the same IP address, you need to be prepared to find, and shut, individual users if informed of wrongdoing. If you ignore such requests, you shouldn't be surprised if you get spanked for it.
That "false positive" event was BS, and the EFF should know better. Slashdot covered the story here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/11/1849207/australian-networks-block-community-university-website
Basically, a community college cheaped-out on it's webhost, and it was sharing a single IP with 1,200 other sites. It is certainly not out of the realm of possibilities that one of those 1,200 was doing something naughty (malware, DDOS, spam, kiddie porn, who knows?), and CheapBastardWebhosting was apathetic when informed about it. Just like any harmful of blatantly illegal site, the next step is a block of the IP.
The block was lifted after the outcry, but I suspect that was more because the block got the webhosts attention and they then properly booted the naughty customer.
EFF, please don't Greenpeace or PETA yourselves with silly crap like this. (This wouldn't be the first time their press releases have stretched or misinterpreted facts more than a bit.)
Yes, Mt. Gox had some anti-money-laundering measures in place. But the legal requirements go far beyond merely verifying the legal identities of your customers, which is all that page covers. (If that was all KYC involved, banks would not need entire large departments dedicated to that function.)
For a small customer like yourself, nothing more than ID is required, which you've supplied. Once you start moving decent amounts of cash, the institution receiving the money is required to know something about the activities the cash came from. It doesn't matter that the currency was BitCoins; the same rules still apply. There are reports to file, records to keep, etc. For instance, a bank is expected to report activities like a hot dog cart suddenly depositing stacks of $20's well out of proportion to a plausible amount of sales.
Not complying with these rules (which is "Financial Institution Regulatory Framework 101") is not going to end well.
Mt. Gox was a shoestring operation that got in WAY over its head. (As in, actual banks have entire departments of employees dedicated to pretending to comply with these kinds of rules, warehouses (or tape libraries) full of documents stored away, etc.)
The likelihood that Mt Gox was complying with the "Know Your Customer" anti-money-laundering rules that apply to all financial institutions that handle currency was approx. zero. I'm not surprised in the least. If a bank was doing what Mt. Gox was, (as in, not even pretending to comply with the law), the same thing would happen.
(That's not to say that disobedience of money laundering never occurs, just that experienced banks are substantially better at hiding it.)
Given that the patent office is self-funded, and rejections only make more time-consuming work, it'd be silly for some Machiavellian Patent Office executive to hand out incentives for rejecting patents.
Correct... banks do not like to deal in large cash volumes (it's expensive, for starters.) However, those businesses for which it makes sense to have a large cash intake still do have access to the banking industry, although a closer eye is kept on them than customers that don't move large cash volumes.
A bank providing services to a BitCoin exchange? Neither the bank nor the exchange has any flipping clue where the BitCoins came from, and unless the exchange sets up a mechanism to find out, then yes, the bank is going to drop the exchange for fear of running afoul of Know Your Customer rules. A few large cash transactions running through the exchange and a whole lot of "I dunno" answers leads to all sorts of uncomfortable meetings with regulators.
Banks don't hate BitCoins (or gold) because it's non-fiduciary... it's because it's a Pain In The Ass to deal with. Banks are more than happy to let an independent entity (as in, not them) deal with BitCoin transfers and storage if they so choose. Agreeing to accept deposits in BitCoins (which due to their volatility are currently utterly incompatible with fractional reserve banking) is a task that would earn them only tiny transaction fees... it's simply not worth the bother.
I suspect it was Transaction Reporting requirements, along with Know Your Customer regulations that did them in. The government doesn't care if you are shoveling Benjamins, BitCoins, Euros, Pesos, or British Pounds, across the counter or over the wire... if you want to trade in heavy quantities of Cash or Cash Equivalents, you have to comply with money laundering laws. If their bank felt they could not keep the account open and still comply with those laws... ker-chop!
Did the fact that BitCoins were being traded have something to do with it? You bet. But they would have been equally eager to shut down an operation dealing with physical currency and numbered accounts... they don't like anonymiity combined with large volumes of untracable cash.
The money supply does not have a direct relationship to GDP. A high-velocity currency (one that trades hands frequently instead of being stored) will have a low value in relation to GDP. A low-velocity currency would behave the opposite.
When reporting the size of the money supply, you will see references to M0, M1, MB, and M2. They are different ways of measuring the supply and are used for different purposes.