Some countries, especially in Europe, have a constitutional guarantee of secrecy of correspondence, wherein email is equated with letters and therefore protected from all types of screening and surveillance.
They also have numerous exceptions for national security, and fairly low thresholds for police and courts to actually get at the data.
Central principles of the Norwegian data privacy regulations are:
Notice how those principles only protect you from private entities (and are pretty vague too).
The potential for damage with this kind of error almost can't be overstated
Yes, it can be overstated. Normal sized print will not get altered by these compression algorithms. Substitutions only occur in data that a human would have trouble reading reliably to begin with. That kind of poor photocopy should never be used for any kind of important task, no matter what.
... may contain wrong data.
They always "may contain wrong data", that's why you need to triple-check and verify for anything that matters.
Many E-mail providers overseas require you to give personal information to sign up, often due to legal requirements in those countries; sometimes they verify that with a credit card number or simply by comparing your address data with government databases. Many countries (including much of Europe) also have data retention requirements and give their own police and intelligence service nearly free reign, and they may well exchange data with the US anyway, so it's not clear you're better off. And some providers of anonymous services may simply be fronts for intelligence agencies. And, of course, if the other parties to your E-mail use a US provider, your data is already available to US intelligence agencies, and your foreign E-mail account will stick out.
As an American, if you want to communicate privately, you have to use encryption, and preferably steganography. Getting an E-mail account in another country really doesn't help very much.
No, you don't, and reductions don't have to happen instantly. A fairly rapid reduction to (picking an arbitrary target) pre-1980s levels could be followed by a lengthier reduction to (also arbitrary) pre-1900 levels, etc.
Look at the per capita GDP (in constant dollars). The US in the 1980's was where the Dominican Republic is today. In 1900, the US was far below even the poorest of today's nations. You can also look at carbon emissions: pre-1900, they were less than 1/10th of what they are today; that takes us into the territory of Indonesia, Vietnam, and Morocco. Do you think Americans would be willing to go back to those standards of living? What do you think that would do to Silicon Valley or our other high tech industries?
The sooner we start, the more gradual the change can be. The Earth can absorb some CO2 emissions, so we don't ever need to go all the way to zero.
Nobody has produced a realistic plan for a reduction to 1980's emission levels, let alone pre-1900 emission levels. And without a firm commitment from China, India, and other developing nations, nothing the US and Europe do would make any significant difference.
Of course I do. But nobody's proposing that except deniers.
You just did: you proposed reductions to 1980's and pre-1900 levels and implied that we could do that without a massive reduction in our standard of living.
Miami begs to disagree. We will have infrastructure problems long before any cities are underwater.
Miami is built in a location where it is prone to certain natural disasters. When people choose to move there, that's what they choose to live with. There is some risk of natural disasters where I live (not climate related), and that's what I have to accept.
Also, climate change isn't the only environmental problem we have.
We're talking about climate change here, not other environmental issues. I am not against environmental laws in principle, I'm against ill-conceived and ineffective environmental laws, and carbon taxes and other climate-change related regulations fall into that category.
Otherwise, a lot of people end up with property they can't sell.
If you live in Miami and you firmly believe that climate change is a big problem, you can sell your property right now with hardly a loss. Except for the housing bubble, the long-term trend for real-estate in Miami is still up.
And moving property lines by fiat takes exactly the sort of totalitarian government that we don't want.
If climate change has the impact people claim it has, risk will gradually increase and property values will gradually decline in some areas and increase in others, and people will buy, sell, and move accordingly, with hardly any losses. Government intervention or "fiat" simply is not required at all.
The first is that many, many people are already being hurt by ongoing pollution,
Why do you keep babbling on about "pollution"? We're talking about climate change here, not any other form of environmental protection.
and the second is that natural processes have their own timetable
Yes, and their timetable is very slow.
So far market-driven change has proved elusive.
Not at all. The US could easily cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half without any risk by building modern nuclear power plants. Solar and wind have made great progress due mostly to technologies developed by the private sector unrelated to government programs.
It is quite possible for government intervention to advance the state of an art, as it regularly does with military technology. Again, this is a situation where the predicted economic doom and gloom
If I'm correct, and that person is morally right, then that's exactly how a justice system should work.
That would result in a justice system rife with arbitrariness and corruption; that's unacceptable. Prosecutors and judges must base their decisions on the letter of the law, not on their opinions of what is morally right. We have mechanisms by which people who are legally guilty but morally innocent can be freed: they can be pardoned, and occasionally there may be jury nullification.
Of course, in the Assange case, all of that is hypothetical since Assange hasn't even been charged with anything.
I find it absolutely frightening that the citizens of the country that supposedly stands against the tyranny of organizations like the Gestapo and the Stasi not only have not overturned their government over this huge scandal, but in fact mostly agree with the surveillance program.
I'm sorry, are you talking about modern Germany here? Because this shit has been going on in Germany for decades, and there seems to be no serious effort to stop it.
In the US, on the other hand, this sort of spying on citizens is a relatively new phenomenon, and people are fighting it. Usually, it takes a couple of decades to shoot something like this down, but it will get shot down in the US.
This could be the beginning of US companies being shunned for what their government is doing.
That's not "the beginning", it's a long, drawn-out process of European politicians and European corporations throwing whatever shit they can at the US in order to try to get Europeans to use European servers and services. They want that both because it means more revenue for them, and because it's easier for European governments to spy on their own citizens if they use European servers.
And please do remember this mail will still be accessible to German courts but now on their own conditions.
Are you really so naive that you think "courts" are involved? German government agencies have nearly free reign in what they access within Germany and what they do with it. You're probably still better off using a US server; the NSA may be listening in to everything you say, but the German government will have a much harder time to get at that information.
And that's where your mentality is fundamentally flawed. You assume that if it's against the law, it's wrong. At best, law and morality are intersecting sets.
I assume no such thing. In fact, I think Assange would be innocent with respect to hypothetical espionage charges by the US. However, I have no problem with the US justice system going after him; that's what they are supposed to do.
"Your mentality is fundamentally flawed" because you think that just because you consider somebody morally right, the justice system should simply give him a free pass. That is not the way any justice system should work.
Law is made in the legislature, not the judiciary. In any event, it's not a foreign nationals responsibility to offer himself up as sacrifice just so the USA can fix their legal system.
Assange is an Australian citizen traveling in the EU; both of those impose responsibilities upon him with respect to both Sweden and the US, including extradition to either country for violations of their laws. So, yes, it is Assange's responsibility to "offer himself up as a sacrifice".
Because giving the US an opportunity to make him their whipping boy would be so politically earth-shattering.
If the guy chooses to rot in the embassy, that's his prerogative. Just spare me the moral outrage over the Swedish and US justice system doing what they are supposed to do.
The guy has been in charge of these programs for more than four years, has known about them since the Bush era, and promised to shut them down. The only reason he is "proposing" to do something now is because it's blowing up in his face, and to distract from all his other scandals. And you can bet that his proposals will change nothing.
How come all the people who are terrified of the "massive" cost of a carbon tax (that they can't quantify)
A carbon tax is laughably ineffective. If you want to stop climate change, you have to stop burning fossil fuels altogether. You simply don't seem to grasp what a massive intervention that is.
shrug off the idea of having to relocate most of our agriculture and the populations of many major cities?
Those are changes that will take centuries if not millennia. Humanity has experienced such massive changes throughout most of history and people aren't even aware of it. There are also few costs associated with it anyway: cities and arable land constantly have to be renewed, and moving them gradually as they are being renewed doesn't add extra cost.
Finally, how come all the people who have the utmost faith in technology's ability to help us cope with climate change never consider that maybe technology could help us cope with higher carbon prices too? It's not like the price of natural resources has never risen before.
I have strong faith in technology to be able to end carbon emissions. In fact, I think that's what will naturally happen, provided people don't foolishly intervene with heavy-handed governmental interventions, tax incentives, and other such programs.
Well, the Swedish prosecutors may think they have a pretty good case, so talking to Assange wouldn't be enough, they'd want to arrest him right away.
And I don't think an Australian accused of rape who at the same time is saying nasty things about the Swedish government is the best case for the Swedish police to improve their responsiveness to the Swedish people. In fact, this case is solving itself rather elegantly by Assange imprisoning himself.
Your and my lack of information about a product isn't solved by hiring more expensive works. In different words, paying more for a product made by US workers doesn't give me strong guarantees that it will perform better. Hence, businesses still face the price and cost pressures.
You still haven't given any reason what motivation Swedish prosecutors would have for doing so. If I were the Swedish prosecutors, I'd say "great, let the guy rot in his self-imposed imprisonment, saves us money and hassle".
Assange wasn't granted refuge because he was an activist, he was granted refuge because he was a refugee - that is, he was at risk of unjust persecution from a state power.
If he didn't have such notoriety, nobody would have granted him refuge. Furthermore, I see nothing "unjust" about his prosecution: he is a suspect in a rape case in Sweden, and a suspect in an espionage case in the US. There is ample evidence to support these charges, and the laws are valid.
Maybe the laws should be different, but they won't change as long as the guy doesn't face the law.
By acknowledging that Sweden may intend to further pass him off to the United States, you're only helping demonstrate the validity of his case.
What kind of fantasy world do you live in? It's not a question of "may intend". If the US indicts him, Sweden is legally obligated to extradite him.
Furthermore, if Assange actually wanted to make a political difference, he'd come out and face the charges in Sweden. Then, if he gets charged in the US, the resulting court case would be enormously important and precedent setting. Instead, Assange rots in self-imposed imprisonment in an embassy. Stupid.
There is no realistic way of stopping the warming that would lead to such a release; short of imposing some kind of totalitarian worldwide government and destroying the world economy, people are not going to stop burning fossil fuels in massive quantities.
Compared to that basic fact, the fact that these predictions are pure guesswork based on many untested assumptions doesn't even matter that much.
If you want reasonable protections, you need to run Tor and browsers on a completely separate machine, a machine where you carefully control the information you input into it (e.g., you may never want to input your real name) and that is never used without Tor.
Ideally, you use separate hardware on a separate network. But since that's a lot of effort, you may go for the next best thing, namely a separate virtual machine on your regular desktop.
The only reason he can make such a fuss and say "why don't the prosecutors come to me" is because he's an activist. If he weren't an activist (i.e., if he didn't have infamy beyond his offense), he wouldn't have been given refuge in the embassy, and he would already have been sent to Sweden (and from there possibly to the US) to face the prosecutors and courts.
Yes, I think it's very important to push against it. But it's important to push in the right direction.
If you look at the last decade of US history, Obama promised European-style protections against these abuses: enforcement of constitutional protections through a strong and active federal government. Obviously, that has turned out to be a disaster: instead of delivering the change Obama promised, as soon as he came to office, he started abusing his powers to enlarge violations of privacy and due process.
So the solution may be to instead limit the size of the federal government, devolve power back to the states, and live with the fact that some states will use that power for good, while others will use it for bad (and people can vote with their feet).
That's why I think it's important to be clear that the problems the US is having now (both in terms of civil liberties and fiscally) are not typically American problems, they are actually historically rather unusual for America. That is, they are a consequence of the US becoming more like the rest of the world, and that's a trend we should reverse.
The problem is that most managers don't give a shit. They are under enormous cost pressure, and standing up for principles and employees costs time and energy, especially when you're being given a hard time by your upper management.
And where does this "cost pressure" come from? Greedy and evil upper management? No, it comes from stock holders, who will dump the stock in a heartbeat if it isn't performing well. And, more importantly, it comes from competitors who will eat your lunch if you don't perform well. And they will eat your lunch because, ultimately, the consumer will prefer the $9.99 service to the $11.99 service, or the $179 gadget to the $219 gadget. And if manufacturers in the US can't get their costs down to the point that they are competitive, they'll move the service overseas.
There used to be big American companies that were free from such pressures, for example IBM and AT&T. They were great to work for. They also had high prices and passed up lots of opportunities for innovation. If the IT world had evolved according to IBM's plans, there'd be a bunch of enormous central, IBM-manufactured mainframes that run a bunch of apps that IBM and a few other big corporations deem worthy, with no ability for anybody else to enter the market.
I've run into this situation myself a number of times and it is morale-crushing.
So is wooing a woman and getting rejected, or trying to beat some record and failing, or not getting a job, or whatever. Disappointment and change are part of life, and you can't impose the cost of protecting you from it on the rest of society.
I really can't figure out why anybody would still defend or support this administration. I mean, I can understand if you make the argument that they were still better than the alternative (that's at least debatable), but the fact that Obama and his administration are opportunists and deeply dishonest should be obvious to anybody now.
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They also have numerous exceptions for national security, and fairly low thresholds for police and courts to actually get at the data.
Notice how those principles only protect you from private entities (and are pretty vague too).
Yes, it can be overstated. Normal sized print will not get altered by these compression algorithms. Substitutions only occur in data that a human would have trouble reading reliably to begin with. That kind of poor photocopy should never be used for any kind of important task, no matter what.
They always "may contain wrong data", that's why you need to triple-check and verify for anything that matters.
Many E-mail providers overseas require you to give personal information to sign up, often due to legal requirements in those countries; sometimes they verify that with a credit card number or simply by comparing your address data with government databases. Many countries (including much of Europe) also have data retention requirements and give their own police and intelligence service nearly free reign, and they may well exchange data with the US anyway, so it's not clear you're better off. And some providers of anonymous services may simply be fronts for intelligence agencies. And, of course, if the other parties to your E-mail use a US provider, your data is already available to US intelligence agencies, and your foreign E-mail account will stick out.
As an American, if you want to communicate privately, you have to use encryption, and preferably steganography. Getting an E-mail account in another country really doesn't help very much.
Look at the per capita GDP (in constant dollars). The US in the 1980's was where the Dominican Republic is today. In 1900, the US was far below even the poorest of today's nations. You can also look at carbon emissions: pre-1900, they were less than 1/10th of what they are today; that takes us into the territory of Indonesia, Vietnam, and Morocco. Do you think Americans would be willing to go back to those standards of living? What do you think that would do to Silicon Valley or our other high tech industries?
Nobody has produced a realistic plan for a reduction to 1980's emission levels, let alone pre-1900 emission levels. And without a firm commitment from China, India, and other developing nations, nothing the US and Europe do would make any significant difference.
You just did: you proposed reductions to 1980's and pre-1900 levels and implied that we could do that without a massive reduction in our standard of living.
Miami is built in a location where it is prone to certain natural disasters. When people choose to move there, that's what they choose to live with. There is some risk of natural disasters where I live (not climate related), and that's what I have to accept.
We're talking about climate change here, not other environmental issues. I am not against environmental laws in principle, I'm against ill-conceived and ineffective environmental laws, and carbon taxes and other climate-change related regulations fall into that category.
If you live in Miami and you firmly believe that climate change is a big problem, you can sell your property right now with hardly a loss. Except for the housing bubble, the long-term trend for real-estate in Miami is still up.
If climate change has the impact people claim it has, risk will gradually increase and property values will gradually decline in some areas and increase in others, and people will buy, sell, and move accordingly, with hardly any losses. Government intervention or "fiat" simply is not required at all.
Why do you keep babbling on about "pollution"? We're talking about climate change here, not any other form of environmental protection.
Yes, and their timetable is very slow.
Not at all. The US could easily cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half without any risk by building modern nuclear power plants. Solar and wind have made great progress due mostly to technologies developed by the private sector unrelated to government programs.
That's not "a fact". Privacy laws in Europe are only stronger with respect to private companies, they are much weaker with respect to governments.
Another "fact" you make up out of thin air.
That would result in a justice system rife with arbitrariness and corruption; that's unacceptable. Prosecutors and judges must base their decisions on the letter of the law, not on their opinions of what is morally right. We have mechanisms by which people who are legally guilty but morally innocent can be freed: they can be pardoned, and occasionally there may be jury nullification.
Of course, in the Assange case, all of that is hypothetical since Assange hasn't even been charged with anything.
Where is the evidence?
I'm sorry, are you talking about modern Germany here? Because this shit has been going on in Germany for decades, and there seems to be no serious effort to stop it.
In the US, on the other hand, this sort of spying on citizens is a relatively new phenomenon, and people are fighting it. Usually, it takes a couple of decades to shoot something like this down, but it will get shot down in the US.
SSL doesn't even offer protection for transmission against the German government, given that the certificates are issued by Telekom itself.
And where is the evidence of the NSA actually engaging in industrial espionage?
That's not "the beginning", it's a long, drawn-out process of European politicians and European corporations throwing whatever shit they can at the US in order to try to get Europeans to use European servers and services. They want that both because it means more revenue for them, and because it's easier for European governments to spy on their own citizens if they use European servers.
Are you really so naive that you think "courts" are involved? German government agencies have nearly free reign in what they access within Germany and what they do with it. You're probably still better off using a US server; the NSA may be listening in to everything you say, but the German government will have a much harder time to get at that information.
I assume no such thing. In fact, I think Assange would be innocent with respect to hypothetical espionage charges by the US. However, I have no problem with the US justice system going after him; that's what they are supposed to do.
"Your mentality is fundamentally flawed" because you think that just because you consider somebody morally right, the justice system should simply give him a free pass. That is not the way any justice system should work.
Assange is an Australian citizen traveling in the EU; both of those impose responsibilities upon him with respect to both Sweden and the US, including extradition to either country for violations of their laws. So, yes, it is Assange's responsibility to "offer himself up as a sacrifice".
If the guy chooses to rot in the embassy, that's his prerogative. Just spare me the moral outrage over the Swedish and US justice system doing what they are supposed to do.
The guy has been in charge of these programs for more than four years, has known about them since the Bush era, and promised to shut them down. The only reason he is "proposing" to do something now is because it's blowing up in his face, and to distract from all his other scandals. And you can bet that his proposals will change nothing.
A carbon tax is laughably ineffective. If you want to stop climate change, you have to stop burning fossil fuels altogether. You simply don't seem to grasp what a massive intervention that is.
Those are changes that will take centuries if not millennia. Humanity has experienced such massive changes throughout most of history and people aren't even aware of it. There are also few costs associated with it anyway: cities and arable land constantly have to be renewed, and moving them gradually as they are being renewed doesn't add extra cost.
I have strong faith in technology to be able to end carbon emissions. In fact, I think that's what will naturally happen, provided people don't foolishly intervene with heavy-handed governmental interventions, tax incentives, and other such programs.
You are a very confused man.
Well, the Swedish prosecutors may think they have a pretty good case, so talking to Assange wouldn't be enough, they'd want to arrest him right away.
And I don't think an Australian accused of rape who at the same time is saying nasty things about the Swedish government is the best case for the Swedish police to improve their responsiveness to the Swedish people. In fact, this case is solving itself rather elegantly by Assange imprisoning himself.
Your and my lack of information about a product isn't solved by hiring more expensive works. In different words, paying more for a product made by US workers doesn't give me strong guarantees that it will perform better. Hence, businesses still face the price and cost pressures.
You still haven't given any reason what motivation Swedish prosecutors would have for doing so. If I were the Swedish prosecutors, I'd say "great, let the guy rot in his self-imposed imprisonment, saves us money and hassle".
If he didn't have such notoriety, nobody would have granted him refuge. Furthermore, I see nothing "unjust" about his prosecution: he is a suspect in a rape case in Sweden, and a suspect in an espionage case in the US. There is ample evidence to support these charges, and the laws are valid.
Maybe the laws should be different, but they won't change as long as the guy doesn't face the law.
What kind of fantasy world do you live in? It's not a question of "may intend". If the US indicts him, Sweden is legally obligated to extradite him.
Furthermore, if Assange actually wanted to make a political difference, he'd come out and face the charges in Sweden. Then, if he gets charged in the US, the resulting court case would be enormously important and precedent setting. Instead, Assange rots in self-imposed imprisonment in an embassy. Stupid.
There is no realistic way of stopping the warming that would lead to such a release; short of imposing some kind of totalitarian worldwide government and destroying the world economy, people are not going to stop burning fossil fuels in massive quantities.
Compared to that basic fact, the fact that these predictions are pure guesswork based on many untested assumptions doesn't even matter that much.
If you want reasonable protections, you need to run Tor and browsers on a completely separate machine, a machine where you carefully control the information you input into it (e.g., you may never want to input your real name) and that is never used without Tor.
Ideally, you use separate hardware on a separate network. But since that's a lot of effort, you may go for the next best thing, namely a separate virtual machine on your regular desktop.
The only reason he can make such a fuss and say "why don't the prosecutors come to me" is because he's an activist. If he weren't an activist (i.e., if he didn't have infamy beyond his offense), he wouldn't have been given refuge in the embassy, and he would already have been sent to Sweden (and from there possibly to the US) to face the prosecutors and courts.
Yes, I think it's very important to push against it. But it's important to push in the right direction.
If you look at the last decade of US history, Obama promised European-style protections against these abuses: enforcement of constitutional protections through a strong and active federal government. Obviously, that has turned out to be a disaster: instead of delivering the change Obama promised, as soon as he came to office, he started abusing his powers to enlarge violations of privacy and due process.
So the solution may be to instead limit the size of the federal government, devolve power back to the states, and live with the fact that some states will use that power for good, while others will use it for bad (and people can vote with their feet).
That's why I think it's important to be clear that the problems the US is having now (both in terms of civil liberties and fiscally) are not typically American problems, they are actually historically rather unusual for America. That is, they are a consequence of the US becoming more like the rest of the world, and that's a trend we should reverse.
And where does this "cost pressure" come from? Greedy and evil upper management? No, it comes from stock holders, who will dump the stock in a heartbeat if it isn't performing well. And, more importantly, it comes from competitors who will eat your lunch if you don't perform well. And they will eat your lunch because, ultimately, the consumer will prefer the $9.99 service to the $11.99 service, or the $179 gadget to the $219 gadget. And if manufacturers in the US can't get their costs down to the point that they are competitive, they'll move the service overseas.
There used to be big American companies that were free from such pressures, for example IBM and AT&T. They were great to work for. They also had high prices and passed up lots of opportunities for innovation. If the IT world had evolved according to IBM's plans, there'd be a bunch of enormous central, IBM-manufactured mainframes that run a bunch of apps that IBM and a few other big corporations deem worthy, with no ability for anybody else to enter the market.
So is wooing a woman and getting rejected, or trying to beat some record and failing, or not getting a job, or whatever. Disappointment and change are part of life, and you can't impose the cost of protecting you from it on the rest of society.
I really can't figure out why anybody would still defend or support this administration. I mean, I can understand if you make the argument that they were still better than the alternative (that's at least debatable), but the fact that Obama and his administration are opportunists and deeply dishonest should be obvious to anybody now.