THAT's the problem right there. They think we're the AUDIENCE and not the CONTRIBUTERS.
This. Mod parent up. I hope someone (or several someones) other than the NSA have been mirroring the comment database. At the bottom of every slashdot page has (always?) been this-
"Comments owned by the poster."
And those comments have always been obviously public. Sounds like a slashdot clone with a scraped comment database for preservation purposes is entirely fair use to me.
Also, reading all of this beta flamefest and considering recent TLD issues- maybe slashdot should be kicked out of.org. Let them go to.com which is clearly what they are primarily interested in.
That doesn't mean you need to find a way to "fake" the chain of evidence. It means that Americans don't fucking like classified evidence, what with our constitution guaranteeing us the right to face our accusers. As in, our actual accusers, not some fictional
This. Right here.
quit playing all these bullshit "Big Brother knows best" games, and if you can't come out and say how you know something, keep it to yourselves.
And That, Right there. Except the situation is even worse than that in the Neo-Stasi U.S. Not only must surveillance be "kept to yourselves", but also not acted upon in any way. Which is impossible, and why this is a true perversion of justice. When you have secret societies with access to such privacy invading databases (read: NSA agents with access to LOVINT on the entire populace), you end up with a lower class of citizens subject to the political manipulations of the elite LOVINT hoarders. Academic debates on public forums with so many spies privy to Stasi-files, that the under-class becomes oppressed for lack of equal status in the public forums. I for one do not trust at all that there aren't other slashdot commenters (and deconfliction units watching over them) that have illegal access to my private records that the NSA has hoovered up. Even if this isn't true, the system obviously presents the situation where people like me believe it anyway. I don't know how else to combat that sort of political manipulation other than putting a gun to my head and ending the psychological torture of living under the modern NSA (I'm not saying it wouldn't be worse if I were a minority 20 years ago amongst the likes of the Rodney King style police force, but in a nice colorblind sort of way, it feels like these days we are all fucked, unless we want to relegate ourselves to the role of little brothers who know our place in the world and don't expect more privacy than that (like the amount we were taught in school we had an 'inalienable right' to)
Yup, more latency as you mentioned, and also likely to accompany it- worse audio quality as more calls are put through the same amount of bandwidth. Ain't progress grand? 30 years ago when I was a child, you could flip cable channels with maybe 0.25s latency for the picture to stabalize, now you can stare at a black screen for a few seconds. (not that my ability to waste my life channel surfing is defensible, but it's the same basic issue. And yes, DVR features do outweigh the degradation of channel change latency, but again, I'm just highlighting that tradeoffs are being made, and it isn't always a net win on user experience)
Not that I'm accusing Lennart Poettering of cyberwarfare, but a highly relevant anecdote is that when pulseaudio was first thrust upon me in fedora, I and many(?) others discovered that it was only software that was preventing our PC's audio out from being overdriven to the point of health and property risk. I discovered this as my volume, due to bug, instantaneously jumped to 400% as I had my sony earbuds in listening to music. The result was excruciating ear pain for the duration of time (about half a second) it took my body to react and rip the earbuds out of my ears. I wonder (not enough to experiment) what would have happened if my speakers had been connected. It would have certainly taken me more than half a second to cause things to stop, and I'm guessing permanent damange to my speakers may have occurred.
Of course, I'm not sure how expensive it would have been for sony to have put a safety in the earbuds. Still, quite the educational experience that was precisely illustrative of what you described, but in a more personal non-industrial sort of way.
But still, thats wierd because I've made (arguably non credible) death threats against Hillary Clinton and jcr, and somehow I now have 2 accounts with excellent karma. I'd suggest watching, and abandoning your racial stereotyping and focus on the legitimate issue of the ultimate opposite of seperation of church and state going on with Israel.
Still, of the last dozen or so comments of yours I read, your mods do seem pretty consistently unreasonable (compared to mine).
Sadly we do live in a day and age where various political un-topics do exist-
- criticizing Israel on the seperation of church and state - criticizing China on the Tiananmen Square Mass^H^H^H Incident of 1989 - criticizing the NSA and the tech oligarchs on the laughable insecurity of closed source OS-accessable reflashable without write-enable jumper firmware
etc....
Thank God for the Snowden Revelations. (and yes, the 'god' was a perhaps freudian typo for 'got', but you knew that and deftly jumped on it in an information warfare way anyway. Good Job!
also, in case anybody is reading this for educational purposes I should further clarify-
Yes, Tom did say "victim of regular hack". However today's extraordinary hack is tomorrow's script kiddie 'regular hack'. Also, I was implying "firmwares flashable by the OS, or anyone who has gotten root on the OS via a network hack". There can be firmwares that require physical access (write enable jumper) to reflash. I suspect a conspiracy is responsible for write enable jumpers for firmware flashing disappearing (but I'm pretty paranoid).
That, as well as the other comment much to the same, is very true.
However, it depends on your threat scenario. If you are the victim of a regular hack, i.e. someone gained entry over the network, then you know your hardware is unchanged,
Firmware and BIOS are software, not hardware. At least the kind that are stored on read-write flash instead of Read Only Memory. Which is most of them these days I believe.
However, I don't want to detract from your sentiment softening my comments. The kind of threat model I was describing involves mal-firmware that, asside from reports of NSA-level usage, have not (yet) seen widespread known usage from 'ordinary hackers'. For the threat model of non-state-or-mafia-supported-hackers, doing a wipe of drive, and perhaps for extra paranoia a reflash of the bios and any other user-supported-flashable firmwares, is a reasonable track. But if you are worried about the NSA, it is not enough.
When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall. There is no way to clean up the system without that where you can be certain that there's not a backdoor left somewhere you didn't look.
Those were the good ol' days. These days everybody knows there are half a dozen backdoors in the various firmwares that even an OS wipe won't get. (disk, network, bios, etc)
that was a pretty harsh response considering I did work in " I might post on slashdot hoping some educted chemists could debunk the issue" as about a third of my comment. Why don't you more constructively work with me on that third, rather than AC ripping me for the other 2/3 as if I hadn't had the qualifier in their.
... confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security.
In all fairness, if I got a job as a TSA agent, and my bosses told me that jars of homemade apple butter could be a threat, I for one would take their word for it. I might post on slashdot hoping some educted chemists could debunk the issue, but I wouldn't presume to know that apple butter didn't happen to be a great masking material for some other explosive material.
I completely understand why they would not be motivated to excel on the exams and/or might smoke a little grass.
Everybody knows that smoking cannabis will lead you to question authority instead of being an automaton willing to launch your nukes without any voice confirmation over the phone.
(If that went over your head, you were probably getting high the last time you watched the first 5 minutes of War Games)
" If someone murders person A then saves person B, we don't compromise and call it manslaughter. We say they are guilty on one count, and not guilty on another. We need to look at Snowden this way."
Who is this 'we' you speak of? While I can't quite quote a specific case contradicting you, I think in practice one must admit that 'we' do this all the time. I think the 'new normal' involves plenty of 4th ammendment violating surveillance, and plenty of looking the other way and selective enforcement.
Personally I have been growing and consuming and distributing cannabis in the state of Kansas for more than 2 years now, documenting publicly on facebook and elsewhere. I've sent 2 emails to kansas.city@ic.fbi.gov about it in the last 2 months. *they don't seem to care*. In fact, between those two emails, we saw the slashdot headline about the FBI removing "law enforcement" as their highest priority, and replacing it with "national security". Boy, shouldn't we just create an agency to handle that and take it off the plate of the FBI so they can get back to law enforcement? (lol)
The new normal of our police state will involve untold amounts of 'looking the other way'. And to 'them' it makes sense. 'They' make up draconian war on drug laws, and then have to contend with the deeper ethical dilemna that locking someone up in a system that has historically tolerated rape, for 10 years, quite likely will prevent that human being from doing something far more beneficial towards society with those 10 years of their life.
I'm sorry, but this is how things seem to be. It's probably always been this way. You may get 90% of judges to agree with your sentiment if discussing the issue with a court reporter, but get them off-the-record and I'll bet they tell you a different story about how the system really works.
mod parent up, it's a pretty important etymology (though I welcome further references to pre-Jesus invocations of the idea)
38 “Teacher,” said John, “we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” 39 “Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, 40 for whoever is not against us is for us. 41 I tell you the truth, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward.
Citation and clarification of statistic requested. I'm guessing the rate of Rodney King style common police brutality has been a fairly steady drop over my lifetime. At least from casual observation of mainstream news sources. I do suspect there is much underhanded 'brutality' going on that merely uses things like 'government blacklisting' (as mentioned in the Seeger news articles today). But as for club blows and kicks raining down on people, I feel like I see less of that in the news over the years, not more. So I worry that one comment, unless you bolster it, really works against the rest of everything you said.
I have found over the last 10 years or so, that it really helps my sanity to see them play these kinds of reindeer games. The thread that helped keep my sanity together thinking about the security vulnerability of all the closed source firmware I was using was this thought- "If my human society and government was anywhere near the sort of thing I could respect and depend on to protect my 'inalienable rights' those in high levels would be talking openly about how as a society we should be considering such potetential surveillance state styles". It was the fact that I was hearing in the public debate, only (not so) vague attempts from all directions to direct the conversation precisely *away* from that center. That is what kept me sane believing that the center really was there, and at the time, in darkness.
Similarly, this summary, if accurate, is an example of the same thing. The hoops, and games they are willing to go through to try and 'normalize' this, after all that has been revealed in the last year- proves in my mind- exactly how bad things really must be.
I may be crazy. That is how I've seen the world in the past 10 years.
Wait, you think tech companies are part of the "system of control" but McJobs aren't?...
I don't actually disagree, but just as I gave VMWare several years before publicly criticizing sensitive things, I'll probably give my fast food ex-co-workers as many years. There is a wonderful connection with a Dave Simon quote to Bill Moyers I'd love to make, but I'll just sum it up with the sentiment which matches yours "wherever you go, there you are".
The part of your response I can most directly take issue with is your implication of believing negligence and incompetence on the parts of these VP types. I find it more plausible that those types of VPs would simply be gagged by NSL. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit.
But he did more than that; he also revealed the legal and legitimate (if somewhat dodgy in some cases) spying on those in other countries, including Angela Merkel's cell phone conversations and the penetration by the NSA of the Chinese communications infrastructure. For that he deserves a long prison sentence.
It is 2014. The world is a smaller, more interconnected place than the place your foreign policy came from. When our founding philosophers talked about inalienable rights, and layed down such things as our Bill of Rights, do you really think that they meant for those comforts in life not to be owed to an average Chinese citizen or even a human woman named Angela Merkel?
The days of foreign policy considering it to shit on everybody outside its borders should be over. The world is Growing Up. Look at the population, what 7 billion today, how many billion was it 100, 200, 1000 years ago? Things are going to get inhumanely ugly if we don't start growing the fuck up and talking openly as respectful adults about these issues Real Soon Now. The Stasi with the internet and modern mobile phone network are an unnacceptable threat to humanity. Like Slavery.
The ability for the government to literally enslave its citizens with a recipe of technology including cheap solar powered drones, and the existing cloud of modern smart phones is utterly fucking terrifying to me. I self medicate with copius quantities of alcohol and cannabis. I have slept much better in the 7 months since the Snowden revelations, because now it seems like we actually get to talk this shit out in public, without *realistic* estimations of what is going on with the secret government being shouted down as tinfoil hat theories.
Pardoning Snowden for all past crimes and enabling his return would prevent the release of any further damaging documents. If Snowden remains within US jurisdiction, any new leaks of his material can lead prosecutors directly to him.
huh? My understanding was that Snowden pilfered a very large dataset, then handed it over to a select group of journalists. I suppose Snowden may have investigated the dataset enough himself to know some things he could divulge that the journalists wouldn't for ethical reasons. In that case, maybe there is a tiny bit to what you said. But in the general case, I think and hope it is safe to assume now that if there is anything in the dataset that one of the journalists has access to that the journalist believes should be released to the public for ethical reasons- well, I think and hope that whatever happens to Snowden is as irrelevant to that journalists decision as possible.
Once the bleeding has stopped, the NSA and the Justice Department should together explain to the voting population the legal concept of "the fruit of the poison tree" - any intelligence gained by espionage should be inadmissible in court outside of direct, existential threats.
I guess maybe I've lived a pretty long life and now you are making me unsure of the law. I would have thought the espionage itself was illegal. Something about the government having to pay you for your pig if they take it or some such.
All governments engage in espionage to some extent, and our goal should not be to remove our "poison garden" and blind ourselves, but to ensure that state secrets are not used as a weapon against the populace.
The problem is *that does not happen*. I think our goal should not be either to create, or eradicate such "poison gardens". But rather to understand that they exist, can be created, and can be used for ethical or unethical purposes. The real dark side to all of this is how much unethical behavior goes on to cover up lesser instances of unethical behavior relating to these poison gardens. And such amplification of unethical behavior can lead to very bad places. I'll admit, that for much of my paranoia, the place I live isn't as bad as I feared it could become 10 years ago. But it's pretty bad. I'd rather be reading more slashdot articles about humanity cleverly engineering solutions to its problems, than cleverly creating what this human being considers to be very big problems. I hope I've been alarmist. I hope 20 years from now we look back and say- oh those animal-house/night-shift whackos at the NSA and GITMO and AbuGhraib, what *exceptions to the rule they were*. I really, really, really pray and hope for that. Because I also really really really fear that the dark impulses of humanity that led to widespread slavery, and hitler and all that.... well, I'm a lot less comfortable with our distance in years from those things than most of society seems to be.
Your rant here does nothing to make me believe they were wrong; in fact, it seems to prove them correct.
I suppose then, that in an information warfare[1] sense, it is good that the objective of my communication was not to persuade you of that. Some people read other's comments to gain wisdom, either directly, or through thought inspiration. Others have different motives. To phrase it differently- if that response is all you got out of my 'rant', then you were missing the point. For the sake of argument (at least), let's just presume that I am crazy. That alone, doesn't by itself make the rest of my points irrelevant, or no longer in need of further dispersal. What will really cook your noodle is when you imagine that the powers that be, have the technical capability to drive anyone they want as crazy as I am, and get away with it. Or rather, until someone leaks the classified documents exposing the crime.
So how is your average google engineer harming and exploiting "the peasants"?
Dear God, it's sunday and here I am on slashdot, oh why, oh why?
Short answer is probably mainly because I've been unemployed for years since I walked out on a six figure salary and a hardwalled office in the historic Xerox-Parc after I walked out on VMWare in January of 2009. Well, we'll set asside my educational 2 months stint working at Wendy's, which truly was more rewarding in every way other than financially than working for VMWare or others.
Why did I do that? I did it because of GITMO. Which oddly enough, I'm going to stretch to being connected with SnowdenPRISMCrash.
I wish I could better quote 'The Matrix' and the 'any one of them can be an agent' speech from Morpheus. But the spirit of those words is my answer to your question about how the 'average googler' is harming the 'peasants'. The fact of the matter is that the 'average googler' works for a system of control. That system of control, has been using the worst kinds of violations of human rights for the last decade to deprive us peasants of the ability to secure our networked digital communications. The 'average googler' has been parroting the party line for the last 10 pre-Snowden years about how - 'you are crazy and paranoid, and there is nothing to worry about, you have no idea how profoundly smart we are here at google and how we know what is best for you. Please, avert your eyes from the man with the NSA hat in the corner fiddling with those cables and that black box he is unpacking'.
Sweet Jesus, don't you get it? Pick your pill. Red or Blue, it's your only choice.
Now follow me as I stumble down the bunny trail...
* note, while the timing of my departure from the realm of the highly paid was more about GITMO, it also was at the same time VMWare was trying to convince me that a non-smart-card fingerprint authd USB stick was sufficient security for the guest tools package signing key connected to an internet connected system. Yes, they wanted me to be one of 4 people whose fingerprint had auth to the guest tools rpm packages private key material. Later I would go on to spout my crazy 'build and signing systems should be airgapped from the internet' theories to ScientificLinux. They hounded me out of the community as a loon as many other communities have as well. Now I have the Snowden revelations to keep my spirit warm at night. Not quite the same warmth as the kind of financial security and ability to build and support and protect a family that the 'average googler' has, but it ain't nothin. Thanks God.
Maybe my tin foil hat is too tight but it seems curious to me that Provo in Utah County is the first city to get this service from Google when just a little way up I-15, at the point of the mountain, is the largest NSA facility in the country. Just sounds like a match made in heaven.
Google is a front for the NSA. Can't believe there are people who still don't know this.
Google Pwnz the NSA, or was it vice versa... Can't believe there are people who still don't know that one of those is true.
my theory is that the Russians have less qualms and impediments to using the same types of tricks and tools as the US, however perhaps less technical ability. I say that latter thinking of Silicon Valley in the US and the history of the internet, though like the moon-landing style got-there-firsts, perhaps now the internet is mature enough that an early lead has evaporated.
Back to your question though- another reason to consider the Russians not wanting Snowden to speak out is because it would anger the U.S, and perhaps in a real-politik sense, Russia is still afraid of what a really-pissed-off USA-intelligence-inner-circle-elite can do to Russia. Or again as before, perhaps there is no superpower-imbalance in this day and age to enable that silenced-by-fear effect.
Slashdot Mirror
THAT's the problem right there. They think we're the AUDIENCE and not the CONTRIBUTERS.
This. Mod parent up. I hope someone (or several someones) other than the NSA have been mirroring the comment database. At the bottom of every slashdot page has (always?) been this-
"Comments owned by the poster."
And those comments have always been obviously public. Sounds like a slashdot clone with a scraped comment database for preservation purposes is entirely fair use to me.
Also, reading all of this beta flamefest and considering recent TLD issues- maybe slashdot should be kicked out of .org. Let them go to .com which is clearly what they are primarily interested in.
We can't just screen scrape those to stand up a new site.
Really? Computers are awesome at repetitive tasks.
Comments owned by the poster.
and public. Sounds like fair use to me.
That doesn't mean you need to find a way to "fake" the chain of evidence. It means that Americans don't fucking like classified evidence, what with our constitution guaranteeing us the right to face our accusers. As in, our actual accusers, not some fictional
This. Right here.
quit playing all these bullshit "Big Brother knows best" games, and if you can't come out and say how you know something, keep it to yourselves.
And That, Right there. Except the situation is even worse than that in the Neo-Stasi U.S. Not only must surveillance be "kept to yourselves", but also not acted upon in any way. Which is impossible, and why this is a true perversion of justice. When you have secret societies with access to such privacy invading databases (read: NSA agents with access to LOVINT on the entire populace), you end up with a lower class of citizens subject to the political manipulations of the elite LOVINT hoarders. Academic debates on public forums with so many spies privy to Stasi-files, that the under-class becomes oppressed for lack of equal status in the public forums. I for one do not trust at all that there aren't other slashdot commenters (and deconfliction units watching over them) that have illegal access to my private records that the NSA has hoovered up. Even if this isn't true, the system obviously presents the situation where people like me believe it anyway. I don't know how else to combat that sort of political manipulation other than putting a gun to my head and ending the psychological torture of living under the modern NSA (I'm not saying it wouldn't be worse if I were a minority 20 years ago amongst the likes of the Rodney King style police force, but in a nice colorblind sort of way, it feels like these days we are all fucked, unless we want to relegate ourselves to the role of little brothers who know our place in the world and don't expect more privacy than that (like the amount we were taught in school we had an 'inalienable right' to)
Yup, more latency as you mentioned, and also likely to accompany it- worse audio quality as more calls are put through the same amount of bandwidth. Ain't progress grand? 30 years ago when I was a child, you could flip cable channels with maybe 0.25s latency for the picture to stabalize, now you can stare at a black screen for a few seconds. (not that my ability to waste my life channel surfing is defensible, but it's the same basic issue. And yes, DVR features do outweigh the degradation of channel change latency, but again, I'm just highlighting that tradeoffs are being made, and it isn't always a net win on user experience)
$185,000 is Raqueteering.
Overloading a system by running it as hard as ...
Not that I'm accusing Lennart Poettering of cyberwarfare, but a highly relevant anecdote is that when pulseaudio was first thrust upon me in fedora, I and many(?) others discovered that it was only software that was preventing our PC's audio out from being overdriven to the point of health and property risk. I discovered this as my volume, due to bug, instantaneously jumped to 400% as I had my sony earbuds in listening to music. The result was excruciating ear pain for the duration of time (about half a second) it took my body to react and rip the earbuds out of my ears. I wonder (not enough to experiment) what would have happened if my speakers had been connected. It would have certainly taken me more than half a second to cause things to stop, and I'm guessing permanent damange to my speakers may have occurred.
Of course, I'm not sure how expensive it would have been for sony to have put a safety in the earbuds. Still, quite the educational experience that was precisely illustrative of what you described, but in a more personal non-industrial sort of way.
I received the Slashdot Death Penalty for ...
Well, I'm guessing it was more for things like-
Stallman is an ethnic Jew and I think we all know that sometimes Jewish folks are given to exaggeration and hyperbole.
But still, thats wierd because I've made (arguably non credible) death threats against Hillary Clinton and jcr, and somehow I now have 2 accounts with excellent karma. I'd suggest watching, and abandoning your racial stereotyping and focus on the legitimate issue of the ultimate opposite of seperation of church and state going on with Israel.
Still, of the last dozen or so comments of yours I read, your mods do seem pretty consistently unreasonable (compared to mine).
Sadly we do live in a day and age where various political un-topics do exist-
- criticizing Israel on the seperation of church and state
- criticizing China on the Tiananmen Square Mass^H^H^H Incident of 1989
- criticizing the NSA and the tech oligarchs on the laughable insecurity of closed source OS-accessable reflashable without write-enable jumper firmware
etc....
Thank God for the Snowden Revelations. (and yes, the 'god' was a perhaps freudian typo for 'got', but you knew that and deftly jumped on it in an information warfare way anyway. Good Job!
also, in case anybody is reading this for educational purposes I should further clarify-
Yes, Tom did say "victim of regular hack". However today's extraordinary hack is tomorrow's script kiddie 'regular hack'. Also, I was implying "firmwares flashable by the OS, or anyone who has gotten root on the OS via a network hack". There can be firmwares that require physical access (write enable jumper) to reflash. I suspect a conspiracy is responsible for write enable jumpers for firmware flashing disappearing (but I'm pretty paranoid).
Wow, parent god modded to -1 ...
http://cryptome.org/2014/01/nsa-codenames.htm
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/nsa-hacking-catalogue/
That, as well as the other comment much to the same, is very true.
However, it depends on your threat scenario. If you are the victim of a regular hack, i.e. someone gained entry over the network, then you know your hardware is unchanged,
Firmware and BIOS are software, not hardware. At least the kind that are stored on read-write flash instead of Read Only Memory. Which is most of them these days I believe.
However, I don't want to detract from your sentiment softening my comments. The kind of threat model I was describing involves mal-firmware that, asside from reports of NSA-level usage, have not (yet) seen widespread known usage from 'ordinary hackers'. For the threat model of non-state-or-mafia-supported-hackers, doing a wipe of drive, and perhaps for extra paranoia a reflash of the bios and any other user-supported-flashable firmwares, is a reasonable track. But if you are worried about the NSA, it is not enough.
When your server gets rooted by a hacker, every security professional worth his money will tell you to wipe it and do a complete reinstall. There is no way to clean up the system without that where you can be certain that there's not a backdoor left somewhere you didn't look.
Those were the good ol' days. These days everybody knows there are half a dozen backdoors in the various firmwares that even an OS wipe won't get. (disk, network, bios, etc)
that was a pretty harsh response considering I did work in " I might post on slashdot hoping some educted chemists could debunk the issue" as about a third of my comment. Why don't you more constructively work with me on that third, rather than AC ripping me for the other 2/3 as if I hadn't had the qualifier in their.
... confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security.
In all fairness, if I got a job as a TSA agent, and my bosses told me that jars of homemade apple butter could be a threat, I for one would take their word for it. I might post on slashdot hoping some educted chemists could debunk the issue, but I wouldn't presume to know that apple butter didn't happen to be a great masking material for some other explosive material.
I completely understand why they would not be motivated to excel on the exams and/or might smoke a little grass.
Everybody knows that smoking cannabis will lead you to question authority instead of being an automaton willing to launch your nukes without any voice confirmation over the phone.
(If that went over your head, you were probably getting high the last time you watched the first 5 minutes of War Games)
" If someone murders person A then saves person B, we don't compromise and call it manslaughter. We say they are guilty on one count, and not guilty on another. We need to look at Snowden this way."
Who is this 'we' you speak of? While I can't quite quote a specific case contradicting you, I think in practice one must admit that 'we' do this all the time. I think the 'new normal' involves plenty of 4th ammendment violating surveillance, and plenty of looking the other way and selective enforcement.
Personally I have been growing and consuming and distributing cannabis in the state of Kansas for more than 2 years now, documenting publicly on facebook and elsewhere. I've sent 2 emails to kansas.city@ic.fbi.gov about it in the last 2 months. *they don't seem to care*. In fact, between those two emails, we saw the slashdot headline about the FBI removing "law enforcement" as their highest priority, and replacing it with "national security". Boy, shouldn't we just create an agency to handle that and take it off the plate of the FBI so they can get back to law enforcement? (lol)
The new normal of our police state will involve untold amounts of 'looking the other way'. And to 'them' it makes sense. 'They' make up draconian war on drug laws, and then have to contend with the deeper ethical dilemna that locking someone up in a system that has historically tolerated rape, for 10 years, quite likely will prevent that human being from doing something far more beneficial towards society with those 10 years of their life.
I'm sorry, but this is how things seem to be. It's probably always been this way. You may get 90% of judges to agree with your sentiment if discussing the issue with a court reporter, but get them off-the-record and I'll bet they tell you a different story about how the system really works.
mod parent up, it's a pretty important etymology (though I welcome further references to pre-Jesus invocations of the idea)
38 “Teacher,” said John, “we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” 39 “Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, 40 for whoever is not against us is for us. 41 I tell you the truth, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward.
http://bibles.org/NIV/Mark/9
Police brutality is becoming more common.
Citation and clarification of statistic requested. I'm guessing the rate of Rodney King style common police brutality has been a fairly steady drop over my lifetime. At least from casual observation of mainstream news sources. I do suspect there is much underhanded 'brutality' going on that merely uses things like 'government blacklisting' (as mentioned in the Seeger news articles today). But as for club blows and kicks raining down on people, I feel like I see less of that in the news over the years, not more. So I worry that one comment, unless you bolster it, really works against the rest of everything you said.
I have found over the last 10 years or so, that it really helps my sanity to see them play these kinds of reindeer games. The thread that helped keep my sanity together thinking about the security vulnerability of all the closed source firmware I was using was this thought- "If my human society and government was anywhere near the sort of thing I could respect and depend on to protect my 'inalienable rights' those in high levels would be talking openly about how as a society we should be considering such potetential surveillance state styles". It was the fact that I was hearing in the public debate, only (not so) vague attempts from all directions to direct the conversation precisely *away* from that center. That is what kept me sane believing that the center really was there, and at the time, in darkness.
Similarly, this summary, if accurate, is an example of the same thing. The hoops, and games they are willing to go through to try and 'normalize' this, after all that has been revealed in the last year- proves in my mind- exactly how bad things really must be.
I may be crazy. That is how I've seen the world in the past 10 years.
Wait, you think tech companies are part of the "system of control" but McJobs aren't? ...
I don't actually disagree, but just as I gave VMWare several years before publicly criticizing sensitive things, I'll probably give my fast food ex-co-workers as many years. There is a wonderful connection with a Dave Simon quote to Bill Moyers I'd love to make, but I'll just sum it up with the sentiment which matches yours "wherever you go, there you are".
The part of your response I can most directly take issue with is your implication of believing negligence and incompetence on the parts of these VP types. I find it more plausible that those types of VPs would simply be gagged by NSL. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit.
But he did more than that; he also revealed the legal and legitimate (if somewhat dodgy in some cases) spying on those in other countries, including Angela Merkel's cell phone conversations and the penetration by the NSA of the Chinese communications infrastructure. For that he deserves a long prison sentence.
It is 2014. The world is a smaller, more interconnected place than the place your foreign policy came from. When our founding philosophers talked about inalienable rights, and layed down such things as our Bill of Rights, do you really think that they meant for those comforts in life not to be owed to an average Chinese citizen or even a human woman named Angela Merkel?
The days of foreign policy considering it to shit on everybody outside its borders should be over. The world is Growing Up. Look at the population, what 7 billion today, how many billion was it 100, 200, 1000 years ago? Things are going to get inhumanely ugly if we don't start growing the fuck up and talking openly as respectful adults about these issues Real Soon Now. The Stasi with the internet and modern mobile phone network are an unnacceptable threat to humanity. Like Slavery.
The ability for the government to literally enslave its citizens with a recipe of technology including cheap solar powered drones, and the existing cloud of modern smart phones is utterly fucking terrifying to me. I self medicate with copius quantities of alcohol and cannabis. I have slept much better in the 7 months since the Snowden revelations, because now it seems like we actually get to talk this shit out in public, without *realistic* estimations of what is going on with the secret government being shouted down as tinfoil hat theories.
Pardoning Snowden for all past crimes and enabling his return would prevent the release of any further damaging documents. If Snowden remains within US jurisdiction, any new leaks of his material can lead prosecutors directly to him.
huh? My understanding was that Snowden pilfered a very large dataset, then handed it over to a select group of journalists. I suppose Snowden may have investigated the dataset enough himself to know some things he could divulge that the journalists wouldn't for ethical reasons. In that case, maybe there is a tiny bit to what you said. But in the general case, I think and hope it is safe to assume now that if there is anything in the dataset that one of the journalists has access to that the journalist believes should be released to the public for ethical reasons- well, I think and hope that whatever happens to Snowden is as irrelevant to that journalists decision as possible.
Once the bleeding has stopped, the NSA and the Justice Department should together explain to the voting population the legal concept of "the fruit of the poison tree" - any intelligence gained by espionage should be inadmissible in court outside of direct, existential threats.
I guess maybe I've lived a pretty long life and now you are making me unsure of the law. I would have thought the espionage itself was illegal. Something about the government having to pay you for your pig if they take it or some such.
All governments engage in espionage to some extent, and our goal should not be to remove our "poison garden" and blind ourselves, but to ensure that state secrets are not used as a weapon against the populace.
The problem is *that does not happen*. I think our goal should not be either to create, or eradicate such "poison gardens". But rather to understand that they exist, can be created, and can be used for ethical or unethical purposes. The real dark side to all of this is how much unethical behavior goes on to cover up lesser instances of unethical behavior relating to these poison gardens. And such amplification of unethical behavior can lead to very bad places. I'll admit, that for much of my paranoia, the place I live isn't as bad as I feared it could become 10 years ago. But it's pretty bad. I'd rather be reading more slashdot articles about humanity cleverly engineering solutions to its problems, than cleverly creating what this human being considers to be very big problems. I hope I've been alarmist. I hope 20 years from now we look back and say- oh those animal-house/night-shift whackos at the NSA and GITMO and AbuGhraib, what *exceptions to the rule they were*. I really, really, really pray and hope for that. Because I also really really really fear that the dark impulses of humanity that led to widespread slavery, and hitler and all that.... well, I'm a lot less comfortable with our distance in years from those things than most of society seems to be.
They hounded me out of the community as a loon ...
Your rant here does nothing to make me believe they were wrong; in fact, it seems to prove them correct.
I suppose then, that in an information warfare[1] sense, it is good that the objective of my communication was not to persuade you of that. Some people read other's comments to gain wisdom, either directly, or through thought inspiration. Others have different motives. To phrase it differently- if that response is all you got out of my 'rant', then you were missing the point. For the sake of argument (at least), let's just presume that I am crazy. That alone, doesn't by itself make the rest of my points irrelevant, or no longer in need of further dispersal. What will really cook your noodle is when you imagine that the powers that be, have the technical capability to drive anyone they want as crazy as I am, and get away with it. Or rather, until someone leaks the classified documents exposing the crime.
[1] http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
So how is your average google engineer harming and exploiting "the peasants"?
Dear God, it's sunday and here I am on slashdot, oh why, oh why?
Short answer is probably mainly because I've been unemployed for years since I walked out on a six figure salary and a hardwalled office in the historic Xerox-Parc after I walked out on VMWare in January of 2009. Well, we'll set asside my educational 2 months stint working at Wendy's, which truly was more rewarding in every way other than financially than working for VMWare or others.
Why did I do that? I did it because of GITMO. Which oddly enough, I'm going to stretch to being connected with SnowdenPRISMCrash.
I wish I could better quote 'The Matrix' and the 'any one of them can be an agent' speech from Morpheus. But the spirit of those words is my answer to your question about how the 'average googler' is harming the 'peasants'. The fact of the matter is that the 'average googler' works for a system of control. That system of control, has been using the worst kinds of violations of human rights for the last decade to deprive us peasants of the ability to secure our networked digital communications. The 'average googler' has been parroting the party line for the last 10 pre-Snowden years about how - 'you are crazy and paranoid, and there is nothing to worry about, you have no idea how profoundly smart we are here at google and how we know what is best for you. Please, avert your eyes from the man with the NSA hat in the corner fiddling with those cables and that black box he is unpacking'.
Sweet Jesus, don't you get it? Pick your pill. Red or Blue, it's your only choice.
Now follow me as I stumble down the bunny trail...
* note, while the timing of my departure from the realm of the highly paid was more about GITMO, it also was at the same time VMWare was trying to convince me that a non-smart-card fingerprint authd USB stick was sufficient security for the guest tools package signing key connected to an internet connected system. Yes, they wanted me to be one of 4 people whose fingerprint had auth to the guest tools rpm packages private key material. Later I would go on to spout my crazy 'build and signing systems should be airgapped from the internet' theories to ScientificLinux. They hounded me out of the community as a loon as many other communities have as well. Now I have the Snowden revelations to keep my spirit warm at night. Not quite the same warmth as the kind of financial security and ability to build and support and protect a family that the 'average googler' has, but it ain't nothin. Thanks God.
Maybe my tin foil hat is too tight but it seems curious to me that Provo in Utah County is the first city to get this service from Google when just a little way up I-15, at the point of the mountain, is the largest NSA facility in the country. Just sounds like a match made in heaven.
Google is a front for the NSA. Can't believe there are people who still don't know this.
Google Pwnz the NSA, or was it vice versa... Can't believe there are people who still don't know that one of those is true.
my theory is that the Russians have less qualms and impediments to using the same types of tricks and tools as the US, however perhaps less technical ability. I say that latter thinking of Silicon Valley in the US and the history of the internet, though like the moon-landing style got-there-firsts, perhaps now the internet is mature enough that an early lead has evaporated.
Back to your question though- another reason to consider the Russians not wanting Snowden to speak out is because it would anger the U.S, and perhaps in a real-politik sense, Russia is still afraid of what a really-pissed-off USA-intelligence-inner-circle-elite can do to Russia. Or again as before, perhaps there is no superpower-imbalance in this day and age to enable that silenced-by-fear effect.