I'd like to hear how precisely this is going to even provide any temporary safety. The whole scheme smacks of government moving closer towards the goal of managing our lives from the birth to death. "Oh, it will make you safer"
Just about every claim along this line has been completly debunked, yet some of them continue to be parroted.
"Oh it will make things more convenient" and on and on it goes. I think there's a very good argument for making things inconvenient for governments.
The group of people having a single (high value) ID document makes things more convenient for dosn't just include government. It also includes criminals...
Actually I do think that Konqueror is a better analogy than Firefox. Konqueror shames a very similar fate to that of IE. It is, as a KPart, reused throughout KDE and cannot be removed without effectively breaking many pieces of KDE. It is used as the file browser, just as IE is. Users may choose to run FireFox, but if they're using KDE they're likely also using Konqueror whether or not they wish to be.
The difference is that you don't have to use KDE or X for that matter with Linux. Whereas IE and the Windows GDI are quite deeply intertwined with the OS. If you need a fairly low resolution display e.g. for a till or ATM you will need to do all sorts of fancy tricks with windows.
Part of the problem here is that when comparing a Linux OS to Windows, you have to recognize the fact that Windows comes bundled with a browser. It is part of the OS and you know that few users want a computer that cannot browse the web.
Where the computer is a tool for said user to do their job it dosn't really matter what the user wants. There are plenty of situations where there is simply no need for a web browser. Both in the embedded and "single application" senarios...
With VHS to DVD, you got to watch your movies at home with better sound and the discs didn't mind being played 1000 times where a VHS would degrade over time.
You also got the ability to instantly go to any scene, pause which gave you a clear picture, subtitles you could switch on and off, alternative sound tracks, etc.
With DVD to HD-DVD/BluRay, you get improved picture and sound (I guess - haven't SEEN one yet)
But does it actually add any new functionality. Joe Public dosn't actually care that much about "quality" of sound and picture, most people are quite prepared to put up with poor quality broadcast television.
you do have the right to use your property as you see fit... but the harry potter movie isn't your property... you never bought harry potter, you bought the disk it was on...
It certainly dosn't help matters when DVD advertisments use languages like "own it on DVD" though...
Now Google seems to be becoming one of those amoral companies.
The entity of the "corporate person" is amoral by definition.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government believes that it can perform surveillance anywhere and can keep the reasons secret. The U.S. government often forces companies not to disclose that they have given information to the government. So, maybe no company can be trusted.
There is no reason to think that the US Government is different in this respect from any other government. The only thing which actually appears to be much of a distinguishing trait is the resources various governments have available to do this kind of thing.
Even if Google "wins" it's a mock trial. The government can already get whatever data it wants from Google using the Patriot Act and force them to keep completely mum about it. Who knows where that data goes aftwerwards.
Actually it's potentially worst than that. It's perfectly possible for data to be copied without it being apparent that it even has been copied, let alone who copied exactly what. Government can just as easily bribe/blackmail an employee as other entities, especially if they want "plausible denyability".
Everyone keeps saying "trust me" then you find out you were lied to afterwards... over and over again.
The problem is that they keep being trusted even after they have lied repeatedly. You'd never hear a US Journalist saying "Pull the other one Mr President"...
The difference here is that if the data was encrypted to begin with, and Google didn't know the key, then there's really nothing to data mine.
Not just encrypted, but each user's data encrypted with a different key (held by the uer only) makes the data would make the data secure from "mining". If the keys were to be known to Google the data might still be encrypted, but not remotly secure.
I have a big question. Why is everyone so uptight about the rights of "American citizens", and apparently not concerned about the rights of visiting foreigners in the US?
Because they havn't read the US Constitution very well, where it means "citizens" it explicitally says citizens. IIRC there is even case law that restrictions in the US Consitution apply in the case of "illegal aliens". Probably the only intended differences were that only citizens could vote & hold office as well as not being barred from entering/removed from the country.
The US Constitution does not specify that non-citizens have no rights, the Fifth Amendment applies to the government's actions, not the nationality of the person.
The entire document applies to the US Government. Also not everyone present in the US at the end of the 18th century chose to become a US citizen,
Google chose to keep the data in accessible form. The only good reason to do so is to leave an open path to data mining. And they're doing it while the Gov't has them in court demanding access to other data generated by their customers.
Any entity, including government, who wants to data mine for illegal purposes isn't even going to go to court in the first place...
It's necessary for a feature they're offering (searching your files across multiple computers).
The feature may require data to be stored somewhere other than on the computers being indexed. But that does not imply that the "somewhere else" must be on Google's servers. Since it's unlikely that you could easily get a 1G connection to Google's servers there are plenty of situations where using Google's servers would be a poor choice for reasons of bandwidth alone. That's before considering that you might want the data kept within your LAN/WAN/VPN/etc.
The new Google Desktop sends "copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents [to] Google's own servers"?
That's scary. What happened to "do no evil"?
In other words by using this feature you can send copies of documents to servers in locations unknown, thus subject to laws unknown, and available to persons unknown. Intellectual property and data protection laws may well have quite a lot to say about this. Exporting relevent data from a country with data protection laws to one without such laws would be against the law. There is also the potential problem of trade secrets and commercially confidential information being leaked.
These allegations have nothing to do with ab/misuses of information gathered via wiretaps -- which were the point of my original posting.
You appear to be claiming that risks of governments mass snooping and the risks of "terrorism" have some sort of XOR relationship. In practice many governments support terrorism, including that against their own citizens. Such information might be valuable to terrorists in the employ of either the same government carrying out the spying (or a "friendly")
Why does everybody suppose that a terrorist is a Muslim?
Because the people making the decisions are idiots. Also US "Intelligence" was originally created to address an enemy nation state. A world wide terrorist conspiracy is the thing most similar to that. In quite a few ways "Al Quada" is a subsitute for the USSR. Both in terms of something which the "spooks" can handle and in terms of political retoric.
I didn't like they way you mentioned if it will be able to translate Arabic to English, I'm aware it was just a way of saying that it is a load of crap (The AI), but come on, cut us [good] Muslims some slack, will ya!
IIRC the term "Al Quada" originates from the US in the first place. It certainly isn't the sort of name any "Islamic Terrorists" would give themselves.
If what he says is true, then it's possible that the technology has been used to protect our lives.
The claim that this system is of any use is the unsubstantiated word of someone who is basically a "salesman", which can hardly be taken as proof of anything.
For instance, the current cartoon uproar is quite probably a concerted effort by certain factions to undermine the Danish in their upcoming role as lead of the UN security council. Then again it might not be. Better intelligence gathering methods and statistical models would be able to give us a better pisture as to wtf is going on exactly.
The thing to remember is that these "certain factions" includes the US Government. It's rather unlikely that the US Government will want to gather intelligence on things it is doing itself or which happen to be in it's own interest.
Even if literally EVERY phone call was monitored (a nearly impossible feat),
You probably want to rename the USA to the "American Democratic Republic" first:)
what's to stop "terrorists" from talking in code?
A good code wouldn't even be recognisable as a code. To initiate a pre-planned terrorist attack dosn't even need a sophisticated code. Which could also be sent by other means than a telephone. Some kind of "broadcast", including email or usenet spam, would make it harder to know the sender or intended recipients. The way you deal with such threats is by infiltraing actual enemy groups. With is hard and highly dangerous.
And you completely ommitted the second requirement for the applicability of Ben Franklin's quote. You must also demonstrate, that the gains in security are only temporary.
Actually you must first demonstrate that there actually are any gains in security as a result of this increased spying. Increasing security is frequently not straightforward and it isn't that unusual for things intended to increase security to actually reduce it.
The balance between security and privacy is affected by fear. On hand, there is a fear of government's abuse and misuse, on the other -- that of the foreign enemies and domestic criminals.
Not forgetting that one of the abuses governments have been known to get up to is the supporting, promoting and funding of terrorism.
I also wish the flow of information from the government to the people was much more open. Trial information is open, and we would know if over 50% of the people accused of a crime were acquitted, then we would know that the police and DAs were doing a crappy job of bringing good cases to court.
Or someone would claim that convictions need to be made easier. It depends if the spin placed on it is "guilty getting away with it" or "innocent people being dragged through court". There are certainly examples of the former happening.
How many of these 1,700+ wiretaps lead to interesting information? If its less than say 25%, I believe that the government is wasting our tax dollars and abusing the subpoena system, and just listening in on our conversations because they are nosy, not because they are out to protect and serve us.
Note that just because something is "interesting" to the people doing the spying does not mean that it is remotely relevent to stopping criminal acts (especially criminal acts against civilians). Historically when governments spy on their citizens they tend to be more concerned with (percieved) political opposition than anything else. Part of the purpose of requiring a warrent is to ensure that the spying actually has some relevence to enforceing laws in way which actually protect the general public.
There are plenty of parliamentary systems you could live under if you like a government where every crackpot has a voice. Personally, I like how the major parties filter out the lunatics.
Problem is they may filter out a lot more than just the "lunatics" and just leave a bunch of "yes men".
Many people put fogs over their past and history is hard to verify
Even non controversial history can be hard to verify. Let alone situations where deliberate mis-information is involved.
For these people, their biographical entries in Wikipedia may need to be covered with disclaimers saying that very little is verifiable about their background because of the individual's actions and unclear testimonials from people surrounding them.
Of course the infomation which may be most easily subject to independent verification may be exactly the same as that which they don't want too well known.
Plus I know a few Ericsson switch engineers and they are all US or UK contract staff which rules out China or Russia to me (but maybe that has changed, maybe Ericsson use Russian staff now?) and Turkey Cyprus or Albania, forget it! Where would they get switch engineers from?
I don't see how there being from Britain or the US rules out any of these possibilities. It isn't even necessary for whoever set things up to know who the ultimate "customer" was.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to hear how precisely this is going to even provide any temporary safety. The whole scheme smacks of government moving closer towards the goal of managing our lives from the birth to death. "Oh, it will make you safer"
Just about every claim along this line has been completly debunked, yet some of them continue to be parroted.
"Oh it will make things more convenient" and on and on it goes. I think there's a very good argument for making things inconvenient for governments.
The group of people having a single (high value) ID document makes things more convenient for dosn't just include government. It also includes criminals...
Actually I do think that Konqueror is a better analogy than Firefox. Konqueror shames a very similar fate to that of IE. It is, as a KPart, reused throughout KDE and cannot be removed without effectively breaking many pieces of KDE. It is used as the file browser, just as IE is. Users may choose to run FireFox, but if they're using KDE they're likely also using Konqueror whether or not they wish to be.
The difference is that you don't have to use KDE or X for that matter with Linux. Whereas IE and the Windows GDI are quite deeply intertwined with the OS. If you need a fairly low resolution display e.g. for a till or ATM you will need to do all sorts of fancy tricks with windows.
Part of the problem here is that when comparing a Linux OS to Windows, you have to recognize the fact that Windows comes bundled with a browser. It is part of the OS and you know that few users want a computer that cannot browse the web.
Where the computer is a tool for said user to do their job it dosn't really matter what the user wants. There are plenty of situations where there is simply no need for a web browser. Both in the embedded and "single application" senarios...
Because it's *Total* *Cost* of ownership?
Except that when you look at such studies you often find all sorts of omissions.
With VHS to DVD, you got to watch your movies at home with better sound and the discs didn't mind being played 1000 times where a VHS would degrade over time.
You also got the ability to instantly go to any scene, pause which gave you a clear picture, subtitles you could switch on and off, alternative sound tracks, etc.
With DVD to HD-DVD/BluRay, you get improved picture and sound (I guess - haven't SEEN one yet)
But does it actually add any new functionality. Joe Public dosn't actually care that much about "quality" of sound and picture, most people are quite prepared to put up with poor quality broadcast television.
you do have the right to use your property as you see fit... but the harry potter movie isn't your property... you never bought harry potter, you bought the disk it was on...
It certainly dosn't help matters when DVD advertisments use languages like "own it on DVD" though...
Google's not fighting for individual rights in that court case. Google's fighting for Google's rights, or, at its broadest, corporate rights.
Most likely Google is concerned that they will have to pay for this kind of spying. Whereas with other kinds of spying it's the spys who pay...
Now Google seems to be becoming one of those amoral companies.
The entity of the "corporate person" is amoral by definition.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government believes that it can perform surveillance anywhere and can keep the reasons secret. The U.S. government often forces companies not to disclose that they have given information to the government. So, maybe no company can be trusted.
There is no reason to think that the US Government is different in this respect from any other government. The only thing which actually appears to be much of a distinguishing trait is the resources various governments have available to do this kind of thing.
Even if Google "wins" it's a mock trial. The government can already get whatever data it wants from Google using the Patriot Act and force them to keep completely mum about it. Who knows where that data goes aftwerwards.
Actually it's potentially worst than that. It's perfectly possible for data to be copied without it being apparent that it even has been copied, let alone who copied exactly what. Government can just as easily bribe/blackmail an employee as other entities, especially if they want "plausible denyability".
Everyone keeps saying "trust me" then you find out you were lied to afterwards... over and over again.
The problem is that they keep being trusted even after they have lied repeatedly. You'd never hear a US Journalist saying "Pull the other one Mr President"...
The difference here is that if the data was encrypted to begin with, and Google didn't know the key, then there's really nothing to data mine.
Not just encrypted, but each user's data encrypted with a different key (held by the uer only) makes the data would make the data secure from "mining". If the keys were to be known to Google the data might still be encrypted, but not remotly secure.
I have a big question. Why is everyone so uptight about the rights of "American citizens", and apparently not concerned about the rights of visiting foreigners in the US?
Because they havn't read the US Constitution very well, where it means "citizens" it explicitally says citizens. IIRC there is even case law that restrictions in the US Consitution apply in the case of "illegal aliens". Probably the only intended differences were that only citizens could vote & hold office as well as not being barred from entering/removed from the country.
The US Constitution does not specify that non-citizens have no rights, the Fifth Amendment applies to the government's actions, not the nationality of the person.
The entire document applies to the US Government. Also not everyone present in the US at the end of the 18th century chose to become a US citizen,
Google chose to keep the data in accessible form. The only good reason to do so is to leave an open path to data mining. And they're doing it while the Gov't has them in court demanding access to other data generated by their customers.
Any entity, including government, who wants to data mine for illegal purposes isn't even going to go to court in the first place...
It's necessary for a feature they're offering (searching your files across multiple computers).
The feature may require data to be stored somewhere other than on the computers being indexed. But that does not imply that the "somewhere else" must be on Google's servers.
Since it's unlikely that you could easily get a 1G connection to Google's servers there are plenty of situations where using Google's servers would be a poor choice for reasons of bandwidth alone. That's before considering that you might want the data kept within your LAN/WAN/VPN/etc.
The new Google Desktop sends "copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents [to] Google's own servers"?
That's scary. What happened to "do no evil"?
In other words by using this feature you can send copies of documents to servers in locations unknown, thus subject to laws unknown, and available to persons unknown. Intellectual property and data protection laws may well have quite a lot to say about this. Exporting relevent data from a country with data protection laws to one without such laws would be against the law.
There is also the potential problem of trade secrets and commercially confidential information being leaked.
These allegations have nothing to do with ab/misuses of information gathered via wiretaps -- which were the point of my original posting.
You appear to be claiming that risks of governments mass snooping and the risks of "terrorism" have some sort of XOR relationship. In practice many governments support terrorism, including that against their own citizens.
Such information might be valuable to terrorists in the employ of either the same government carrying out the spying (or a "friendly")
Why does everybody suppose that a terrorist is a Muslim?
Because the people making the decisions are idiots. Also US "Intelligence" was originally created to address an enemy nation state. A world wide terrorist conspiracy is the thing most similar to that. In quite a few ways "Al Quada" is a subsitute for the USSR. Both in terms of something which the "spooks" can handle and in terms of political retoric.
I didn't like they way you mentioned if it will be able to translate Arabic to English, I'm aware it was just a way of saying that it is a load of crap (The AI), but come on, cut us [good] Muslims some slack, will ya!
IIRC the term "Al Quada" originates from the US in the first place. It certainly isn't the sort of name any "Islamic Terrorists" would give themselves.
If what he says is true, then it's possible that the technology has been used to protect our lives.
The claim that this system is of any use is the unsubstantiated word of someone who is basically a "salesman", which can hardly be taken as proof of anything.
For instance, the current cartoon uproar is quite probably a concerted effort by certain factions to undermine the Danish in their upcoming role as lead of the UN security council. Then again it might not be. Better intelligence gathering methods and statistical models would be able to give us a better pisture as to wtf is going on exactly.
The thing to remember is that these "certain factions" includes the US Government.
It's rather unlikely that the US Government will want to gather intelligence on things it is doing itself or which happen to be in it's own interest.
Even if literally EVERY phone call was monitored (a nearly impossible feat),
:)
You probably want to rename the USA to the "American Democratic Republic" first
what's to stop "terrorists" from talking in code?
A good code wouldn't even be recognisable as a code. To initiate a pre-planned terrorist attack dosn't even need a sophisticated code. Which could also be sent by other means than a telephone. Some kind of "broadcast", including email or usenet spam, would make it harder to know the sender or intended recipients.
The way you deal with such threats is by infiltraing actual enemy groups. With is hard and highly dangerous.
And you completely ommitted the second requirement for the applicability of Ben Franklin's quote. You must also demonstrate, that the gains in security are only temporary.
Actually you must first demonstrate that there actually are any gains in security as a result of this increased spying. Increasing security is frequently not straightforward and it isn't that unusual for things intended to increase security to actually reduce it.
The balance between security and privacy is affected by fear. On hand, there is a fear of government's abuse and misuse, on the other -- that of the foreign enemies and domestic criminals.
Not forgetting that one of the abuses governments have been known to get up to is the supporting, promoting and funding of terrorism.
I also wish the flow of information from the government to the people was much more open. Trial information is open, and we would know if over 50% of the people accused of a crime were acquitted, then we would know that the police and DAs were doing a crappy job of bringing good cases to court.
Or someone would claim that convictions need to be made easier. It depends if the spin placed on it is "guilty getting away with it" or "innocent people being dragged through court". There are certainly examples of the former happening.
How many of these 1,700+ wiretaps lead to interesting information? If its less than say 25%, I believe that the government is wasting our tax dollars and abusing the subpoena system, and just listening in on our conversations because they are nosy, not because they are out to protect and serve us.
Note that just because something is "interesting" to the people doing the spying does not mean that it is remotely relevent to stopping criminal acts (especially criminal acts against civilians). Historically when governments spy on their citizens they tend to be more concerned with (percieved) political opposition than anything else.
Part of the purpose of requiring a warrent is to ensure that the spying actually has some relevence to enforceing laws in way which actually protect the general public.
There are plenty of parliamentary systems you could live under if you like a government where every crackpot has a voice. Personally, I like how the major parties filter out the lunatics.
Problem is they may filter out a lot more than just the "lunatics" and just leave a bunch of "yes men".
Many people put fogs over their past and history is hard to verify
Even non controversial history can be hard to verify. Let alone situations where deliberate mis-information is involved.
For these people, their biographical entries in Wikipedia may need to be covered with disclaimers saying that very little is verifiable about their background because of the individual's actions and unclear testimonials from people surrounding them.
Of course the infomation which may be most easily subject to independent verification may be exactly the same as that which they don't want too well known.
Plus I know a few Ericsson switch engineers and they are all US or UK contract staff which rules out China or Russia to me (but maybe that has changed, maybe Ericsson use Russian staff now?) and Turkey Cyprus or Albania, forget it! Where would they get switch engineers from?
I don't see how there being from Britain or the US rules out any of these possibilities. It isn't even necessary for whoever set things up to know who the ultimate "customer" was.