Ulbricht called himself an "agorist". Agorism is a strong form of anarcho-capitalist politics, which believes the if the state were to disappear a peaceful utopia would result. It explicitly rejects the political process as a means to bring about this change. Instead agorists believe in "counter economics", i.e. engaging in illegal activity not in order to benefit from it per se but rather to undermine the state and bring about an agorist world.
Agorists are often inspired by the writings of a guy called Murray Rothbard, and Ulbricht was fond of quoting Rothbard in order to explain why he thought certain ways. Rothbard DID believe in voting as a means to bring about change, and was thus not strictly an agorist. However if you actually read Rothbards writings (he wrote a book), then you will find it relatively empty of insight - he is the kind of person who makes a statement that seems reasonable, and then repeatedly extrapolates it in steps, until it becomes something that is flatly contradicted by observable reality. You can read what he thought about cartels and monopolies for an example of this kind of thinking. He concludes based on a long and twisty argument that cartels are inherently unstable and monopolies aren't a problem (because eventually a competitor will arise... somehow), which doesn't match how real markets seem to work.
DPR is thus a man who frequently quotes an overly simplistic book of philosophy that provides no evidence for its claims, and uses it to justify a quest to overthrow civilisation via crime in order to established a promised utopia. That description reminds me of another category of criminal that has occupied a lot of attention from western governments in the last decade.
No it wasn't. A lot of money in Swiss banks is money held by the owners illegally, we're not talking about tax avoidance here, we're talking about out and out tax evasion.
Are you American by any chance?
The US certainly feels that way, but that's because the US has a retarded tax system that is based on citizenship as well as residency. That is, anyone unlucky enough to be born American (or get a green card or a bunch of other factors) is expected to pay tax to the IRS no matter where they go and live. Giving up your citizenship isn't so easy either, beyond the fact that you'd need some other country to take you in, there's an "exit tax" to pay too.
No other country except some tin-pot African dictatorship uses such a scheme. Unsurprisingly then, as seen from Washington literally every country in the world holds "lots of money from tax evaders", even though that position is stupid. Hence FATCA.
Now, the Swiss could certainly argue a different viewpoint to the one you just espoused. The Swiss have been wealthy for a long time, but the idea that banks are supposed to be some shadow police force is a very recent one. It dates to the US passage of the Banking Secrecy Act in the 70s and the Money Laundering Control Act in the 80s. Actually the whole concept of money laundering was created quite recently by the USA. As a social policy it's younger than most people are. Despite many extremely serious costs and side effects, these policies were then forced onto the rest of the world, through threat of financial sanctions in some cases.
The Swiss have always until recently had strict policy of strong financial privacy. So guess what - Swiss reluctance to sign up for the new fad of turning bankers into policemen suddenly means they're the bad guys. By the way, banking privacy in Switzerland has applied to their own tax collectors too. Somehow they still manage to collect tax, have a strong government, low crime rates, low inflation and low tax rates. Apparently their approach is not incompatible with civilised society after all!
This idea that the Swiss are rich exclusively because of some evil rule breaking is exactly the kind of absurd rhetoric that could lead to some invasion scenario, which is why the military uses it to practice with. But it's just not matched by reality. If you look at a GDP breakdown by sector you can see that manufacturing and specialised services make up a huge fraction of the Swiss economy. The biggest Swiss company isn't even a bank, it's Nestle. A big chunk of Swiss wealth comes from precision machinery, pharmaceuticals, IT, tourism and specialised financial services which are NOT banking (think industrial insurance etc).
There is lots of academic research that indicates the "deflationary spiral" doesn't happen like that.
Bitcoin having a fixed final size is just fine - it means when the economy grows, everyones money becomes worth a little bit more, i.e. prices fall a bit. Things get cheaper. That's sort of what you expect from progress, isn't it?
That's because people are idiots. Not only would a European-based competitor NOT prevent the NSA and GCHQ from getting at your data, it's not going to prevent any other agency from getting at it either.
I think that's a bold claim. Remember that when GCHQ wanted to spy on phone calls from the Middle East, they didn't do it by serving Belgacom with some dubious order from a bogus court. No such courts exist in Europe, at least as far as I know. They did it by hacking Belgacom directly and then they got caught when the telco went looking for them (and presumably evicted).
The UK has some pretty crap laws when it comes to surveillance, largely a hangover from the IRA era (which was a way scarier terrorist group than al-Qaeda, so it's somewhat understandable). The "9 hours at the border" thing comes from that time, it predates 9/11 actually. However the rest of Europe, not so much.
With regards to the solutions, I guess some companies will do exactly as you suggest and in source, or at least partially in-source private data. But that's a giant pain in the ass. Expect to see some novel and innovative approaches to squaring this circle in the coming years - cryptographers have spent a lot of time finding ways to do computation in the cloud over encrypted data. Perhaps they will finally see some of it get used.
But what can be done? "Outrage" doesn't achieve anything. It became abundantly clear the moment senior members of the military were caught lying and nothing was done, that what the public think doesn't matter. So why should the public make a fuss? Waste of energy.
CNN and the likes are just reflecting the fact that the general story is by now well known and not news. The NSA lies and is totally out of control. It does everything the most paranoid people ever imagined, and more. OK. Got it. Next story.
But make no mistake. The right people are still paying attention. Behind the scenes there's a lot going on in a lot of places. All kinds of people who previously would not have included government agencies in their threat models are now starting to do so. Change will take years, perhaps decades, and enormous amounts of technical talent is going to be wasted fighting the US government by trying to blind it with more effective encryption. Success is by no means guaranteed. But without a doubt those members of the general public who have the ability to take part in that are still paying attention.
Back then they didn't know they themselves had been spied on. But I agree. It didn't take a Kreskin to see the spying on Brazil revelations coming once they started. They should have stood up for it. In fairness to the region, other Latin American countries did.
You know, I've read this excuse a million times since Snowden did his thing, and I'm sick of it.
The problem is it's an abuse of language. Saying "Every country spies. It's one of those things governments are supposed to do" is nothing but rhetorical sleight of hand. The word spy conjures up cartoons of men in pork-pie hats and long raincoats following some traitor in a car. The word is loaded with cold war imagery. It reminds people of a time when there was an "us" vs a "them" and spying was a very small scale and targeted activity done against "them" or, at very least, those of "us" working for "them".
We need a new word to describe what's going on in todays world. Spying doesn't even come close to being the right word. How about totalitarian surveillance? But even that isn't strong enough to communicate the reality we are living in.
In today's reality there's no us vs them. There's no good vs evil, capitalism vs communism. There's just bureaucrats and their power, exercised over their own people as readily as over foreigners.
This is not only not "one of those things governments are supposed to do", it's often one of those things governments are expressly prohibited from doing by their own laws. And that's for good reasons!
Please, don't flatter the NSA by calling them spies. They aren't spies at this point. They are real life equivalents of O'Brien, the dedicated agent of totalitarian control in 1984. O'Brien is a far darker and scarier character than anyone who could be described as a spy.
A couple of problems here. Firstly a lot of those stories refer to an event in 2008, and Der Spiegel claims GCHQ only got access to Belgacom in 2010. So their spying cannot have been relevant there.
Secondly, the evidence in those cases was the sort of thing that can be obtained using ordinary court orders or ordinary, limited and carefully controlled wiretaps. The people targeted went to the Afghan-Pakistani border for months and according to one article, some of them were already known criminals in Belgium even before then. Getting a tight, time limited court order for surveillance of these people within Belgium is easily possible - at no point would Britain hacking Belgium have been helpful in such a prosecution and indeed, would have been dangerous - if the evidence was obtained without a warrant and defence counsel found out, the case might have collapsed.
I strongly dislike this notion that the acts Snowden uncovered are all OK because occasionally, the authorities do manage to catch terrorists. Guess what? They also catch random serial killers, fraudsters, drunk drivers who do hit and runs, all kinds of other criminals.... just using the ordinary tools and strict supervision they are supposed to operate under. Where's the evidence that tightly specified, time limited court orders issued by open courts are insufficient? Can you point me to just one case of a terrorist who successfully blew himself up because a judge mistakenly denied a reasonable warrant request? I've not heard of such a thing, even though occasional mistakes would be expected and not by itself sufficient to conclude what the NSA/GCHQ does is necessary.
I suppose the way it can work is this - after a reasonable if not rich life style, they lose a job and lose the apartment. They now get food stamps, but it's not quite enough to live off each months, so they end up living on the street. Due to the lack of rent payments, they now have enough money from social security to buy OK food and drinks. They still have laptop and phone from before things went south, even though they might not be able to afford a new one.
It's worse than that. Yes, you need some kind of an address to get a bank account thanks to stricter AML laws passed in the PATRIOT Act.
However, if you spend a while in the cash economy, when you do get back on your feet many banks will refuse to take your cash as a deposit. Because they don't know how you got that cash, they are afraid of being considered money launderers by allowing you to deposit it. So once people fall out of the banking system it can be hard to get back in, which then in turn keeps these people down (and more likely to be criminals). All in the name of fighting the terrorists.
By the way, the US government knows the power of being evicted from the financial system full well. That's why they're starting to enforce US law internationally even though they can't jail people outside their borders. Instead of jail the punishment they use is being blacklisted from the financial system and having all your bank accounts closed. If you're a middle class guy with a home, a mortgage, kids etc and one day banks stop wanting to deal with you because you pissed off the US, then you could find yourself on the street faster than you might think. After all, what are you going to do when your bank accounts get closed - take out your life savings and pension as cash?
Fortunately, despite the name, it seems BountySource also supports fundraisers aka Kickstarter-style schemes aka "assurance contracts". We know from Kickstarter that this model can scale to very large investments, when the project leaders are credible and there are lots of people who want something done. Unfortunately Kickstarter has a very narrow focus, so it's really great to see someone step up and create a competitor focused on the open source world. If I didn't already have a job I'd definitely consider experimenting with funding myself this way.
I think there are two technologies coming up that could help this situation somewhat. Although they're both a bit exotic currently.
The first one is Bitcoin proofs of sacrifice. The basic idea here is that you can obtain some Bitcoin via whatever means, and then sacrifice it (to miner fees) in such a way that you can create a data structure containing a public key which also proves that you threw that money away. Poof - you just created an anonymous "identity" that had a specific cost and that you therefore do not wish to lose. By adding this proof (or hash of the proof) to shared blacklists, you can then be banned from various sites. If you really really want to get back in, you can of course make a new sacrifice - but it could get expensive fast. People who behave can re-use their non banned proof at lots of websites and may never need to make a new one.
The second technology is called SCIP/TinyRAM and it allows you to generate a proof that some arbitrary computation was done correctly, where some of the inputs to that computation can be private. For example, you can take some rare and difficult to obtain object - like your NFC enabled passport - and then run a provable computation that verifies the signed cert chain stored inside the chip. The passport data is a private input. The output of the program is a hash of the passport and the fact that it was valid (signature chains were correct). This "proof" is then used as above - you can send it to websites who can then ban you if they wish, but they never learn your real identity. The bans stick because you can't easily obtain a new identity from the passport office.
I prefer the Bitcoin approach because it sets a market for abuse... if you screw up and get banned in a lot of places, you can get a second chance by spending money. With the passport approach it can theoretically be done using any NFC enabled Android smartphone, so it's more accessible, but you only get once chance unless bans expire after a time period.
That's not what the article actually says. What it says is that the murder rate in the USA is much higher in general (it makes no mention of gang warfare), but that the mugging rate is lower than in Europe. Perhaps because people get shot instead of mugged instead?
Also, although it's a minor issue, I take umbrage with your phrasing of the first statement. It can be read to imply that violent crime in the USA is somehow doing better than normal. In fact violent crime rates have fallen everywhere in lockstep with phasing out of leaded petrol. The US has merely followed that trend, as would be expected from a phenomenon rooted in heavy metal poisoning.
So essentially what we have is that violent crime fell everywhere, including the USA, but in America muggings are generally replaced with shootings.
I'm a Brit who lives in central Europe. So, if you have a point, I'm not sure what it is.
Europe isn't it like it was in the first part of the 20th century. There are no former, broken empires having massive war reparations extracted from them right on Britain's doorstep. There are no charismatic leaders with radically nationalistic talk. Russia isn't going to invade Europe anytime soon. Neither is China. In the event that the world undergoes radical political change, there will be plenty of warning and time to engage in an arms race.
The country that has most extra-territorial control over Europe is the USA. Russia and China do not explicitly threaten or indeed engage in warfare of any kind against Europeans. The USA has actually passed laws that will automatically bankrupt any financial institution anywhere that does not comply with US law. If US law conflicts with local law, tough.
If there's ANY country that Europe might need to defend itself against in the forseeable future, it's the USA. Against military attack? Probably not. Against other forms of attack? It already happens.
Europe has plenty enough military capability for its needs. France and the UK spend a disproportionate amount of money on their militaries. I really doubt military protection even crosses the minds of politicians in Europe.
Politicians roll over for a variety of reasons. One is that some of them have the same worldview as the most hawkish members of Congress. Look at how Cameron and some other senior Tory MP's were salivating over the idea of bombing the shit out of Syria. The disappointment at the no vote was obviously not faked, they genuinely felt like that. It's an age thing - politicians skew old and older people tend to have more aggressive foreign policy views than younger people do (at the moment).
Another reason is that they understand the political situation in the USA all too well. The USA does not have friends, or allies. The "special relationship" crap the UK government is fond of trotting out fools nobody, which is confirmed by polling. In the Congressional mindset there exists only two worlds, domestic and foreign. That means the USA won't even hesitate to apply the same brutal economic strategies it applies to Iran to other countries, if those countries were to step out of line. As FATCA rolls out parliaments around the world are learning this one the hard way and are being forced to change their own laws to avoid Iran's fate. The USA has announced to the world that you're either with them or against them, and if you're against them, you'll be treated no differently to any other "rogue state". If the sanctioned and destroyed institutions are systematically important European banks - no problem.
Understandably, European politicians do not want to go in front of their own people and say "We cannot implement this policy because the USA will impose crippling punishments on us automatically if we do", because that makes them seem weak and useless (which indeed they are). And they believe that even if a popular vote were to bring in such a policy, if it resulted in serious recession and job losses then they'd be punished for it. Whether they're right or not is hard to say. Much better to just ignore the elephant in the room, especially if they actually like the idea of seeming tough and strong and being the next Churchill.
The risk is that growing anti-Americanism (which as you observe, is in reality closer to anti-Washington-ism) will continue to be a blind spot for major political parties until it turns into a boiling over pot, just as concerns about immigration did. That leads to the possibility of parties with extremely radical policies starting to gain power, which history tells us is rarely a positive thing.
You think they don't monitor US transactions too? What about transactions that have one end in the USA? Or which are executed by banks which are active in the USA but technically headquartered in London? What about the data feeds they get from GCHQ?
Anyway, the constitution doesn't mention any such thing because it was inconceivable back then. There is plenty of language in the constitution that states the government should get a warrant for things that are like financial transaction data:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
Note "the people". Not "US citizens" or "US persons" or "people who are geographically within the USA at the time a paper is made" but "the people". The constitution uses that language quite carefully because the authors were highly familiar with the ways governments wriggle out of rules using artificial reclassifications or redefinitions of common concepts.
Anyway, who cares? Everyone outside the USA doesn't want the NSA to watch their financial transactions, or any other foreign intelligence agency. Saying it's allowed by the law just tells everyone else that the law is inadequate. And yes that applies to the UK and other places that have industrial-scale programs that spy on ordinary citizens of other countries.
What the article actually says in the last paragraph is that there's currently a capacity shortage, that's expected to be resolved by 2015. The article also says manufacturers think they can go down another process node, and then do another 3 after that using 3D stacking. Then he says new technologies "with the speed of DRAM and the storage capacity of NAND" might make their way out of the lab next year.
Overall, the article's contents don't really seem to support the notion that it's game over for SSD capacity improvements.
I looked at the paper from CRI, they apparently did do testing on the raw (pre-whitening) entropy source on test chips that give direct access to it. Unfortunately the goal of that audit was to build confidence in the general design, the NSA wasn't an issue when that was done.
What I take away from this is - the good news is, the RDRAND circuitry has an open, well documented design which is apparently robust. Thus, if we can obtain confidence that it's not backdoored by the NSA, it's a great feature to have. Note to people talking about China, etc, Intel run all their own fabs. The chance of a technique as complicated as crypto backdoors using dopant trojans being inserted into the manufacturing process inside Intel-controlled fabs is close to zero. If it's done, it's done with the knowledge and co-operation of management.
The question is how can the world build such confidence? The standard way would be to decap some randomly chosen chips and analyze with an SEM, but I have no idea if that's feasible for something as complicated as a modern Intel core. Presumably Intel themselves can do it for debugging purposes, but whether it can be done in the absence of lots of proprietary information is unclear. Also, the output of RDRAND could presumably be patched using microcode updates, so just because the chips ship without a backdoor doesn't mean one couldn't be introduced later through a firmware/BIOS update.
Slashdot Mirror
Nailed it.
Ulbricht called himself an "agorist". Agorism is a strong form of anarcho-capitalist politics, which believes the if the state were to disappear a peaceful utopia would result. It explicitly rejects the political process as a means to bring about this change. Instead agorists believe in "counter economics", i.e. engaging in illegal activity not in order to benefit from it per se but rather to undermine the state and bring about an agorist world.
Agorists are often inspired by the writings of a guy called Murray Rothbard, and Ulbricht was fond of quoting Rothbard in order to explain why he thought certain ways. Rothbard DID believe in voting as a means to bring about change, and was thus not strictly an agorist. However if you actually read Rothbards writings (he wrote a book), then you will find it relatively empty of insight - he is the kind of person who makes a statement that seems reasonable, and then repeatedly extrapolates it in steps, until it becomes something that is flatly contradicted by observable reality. You can read what he thought about cartels and monopolies for an example of this kind of thinking. He concludes based on a long and twisty argument that cartels are inherently unstable and monopolies aren't a problem (because eventually a competitor will arise ... somehow), which doesn't match how real markets seem to work.
DPR is thus a man who frequently quotes an overly simplistic book of philosophy that provides no evidence for its claims, and uses it to justify a quest to overthrow civilisation via crime in order to established a promised utopia. That description reminds me of another category of criminal that has occupied a lot of attention from western governments in the last decade.
Are you American by any chance?
The US certainly feels that way, but that's because the US has a retarded tax system that is based on citizenship as well as residency. That is, anyone unlucky enough to be born American (or get a green card or a bunch of other factors) is expected to pay tax to the IRS no matter where they go and live. Giving up your citizenship isn't so easy either, beyond the fact that you'd need some other country to take you in, there's an "exit tax" to pay too.
No other country except some tin-pot African dictatorship uses such a scheme. Unsurprisingly then, as seen from Washington literally every country in the world holds "lots of money from tax evaders", even though that position is stupid. Hence FATCA.
Now, the Swiss could certainly argue a different viewpoint to the one you just espoused. The Swiss have been wealthy for a long time, but the idea that banks are supposed to be some shadow police force is a very recent one. It dates to the US passage of the Banking Secrecy Act in the 70s and the Money Laundering Control Act in the 80s. Actually the whole concept of money laundering was created quite recently by the USA. As a social policy it's younger than most people are. Despite many extremely serious costs and side effects, these policies were then forced onto the rest of the world, through threat of financial sanctions in some cases.
The Swiss have always until recently had strict policy of strong financial privacy. So guess what - Swiss reluctance to sign up for the new fad of turning bankers into policemen suddenly means they're the bad guys. By the way, banking privacy in Switzerland has applied to their own tax collectors too. Somehow they still manage to collect tax, have a strong government, low crime rates, low inflation and low tax rates. Apparently their approach is not incompatible with civilised society after all!
This idea that the Swiss are rich exclusively because of some evil rule breaking is exactly the kind of absurd rhetoric that could lead to some invasion scenario, which is why the military uses it to practice with. But it's just not matched by reality. If you look at a GDP breakdown by sector you can see that manufacturing and specialised services make up a huge fraction of the Swiss economy. The biggest Swiss company isn't even a bank, it's Nestle. A big chunk of Swiss wealth comes from precision machinery, pharmaceuticals, IT, tourism and specialised financial services which are NOT banking (think industrial insurance etc).
This crap is so old it's actually mentioned in the bitcoin FAQ:
http://bitcoin.org/en/faq#wont-bitcoin-fall-in-a-deflationary-spiral
There is lots of academic research that indicates the "deflationary spiral" doesn't happen like that.
Bitcoin having a fixed final size is just fine - it means when the economy grows, everyones money becomes worth a little bit more, i.e. prices fall a bit. Things get cheaper. That's sort of what you expect from progress, isn't it?
I think that's a bold claim. Remember that when GCHQ wanted to spy on phone calls from the Middle East, they didn't do it by serving Belgacom with some dubious order from a bogus court. No such courts exist in Europe, at least as far as I know. They did it by hacking Belgacom directly and then they got caught when the telco went looking for them (and presumably evicted).
The UK has some pretty crap laws when it comes to surveillance, largely a hangover from the IRA era (which was a way scarier terrorist group than al-Qaeda, so it's somewhat understandable). The "9 hours at the border" thing comes from that time, it predates 9/11 actually. However the rest of Europe, not so much.
With regards to the solutions, I guess some companies will do exactly as you suggest and in source, or at least partially in-source private data. But that's a giant pain in the ass. Expect to see some novel and innovative approaches to squaring this circle in the coming years - cryptographers have spent a lot of time finding ways to do computation in the cloud over encrypted data. Perhaps they will finally see some of it get used.
Who says the general public doesn't care about it?
Polling shows that even back in July the US public knew the NSA was lying and disapprove of what's happening by 2:1.
But what can be done? "Outrage" doesn't achieve anything. It became abundantly clear the moment senior members of the military were caught lying and nothing was done, that what the public think doesn't matter. So why should the public make a fuss? Waste of energy.
CNN and the likes are just reflecting the fact that the general story is by now well known and not news. The NSA lies and is totally out of control. It does everything the most paranoid people ever imagined, and more. OK. Got it. Next story.
But make no mistake. The right people are still paying attention. Behind the scenes there's a lot going on in a lot of places. All kinds of people who previously would not have included government agencies in their threat models are now starting to do so. Change will take years, perhaps decades, and enormous amounts of technical talent is going to be wasted fighting the US government by trying to blind it with more effective encryption. Success is by no means guaranteed. But without a doubt those members of the general public who have the ability to take part in that are still paying attention.
Back then they didn't know they themselves had been spied on. But I agree. It didn't take a Kreskin to see the spying on Brazil revelations coming once they started. They should have stood up for it. In fairness to the region, other Latin American countries did.
You know, I've read this excuse a million times since Snowden did his thing, and I'm sick of it.
The problem is it's an abuse of language. Saying "Every country spies. It's one of those things governments are supposed to do" is nothing but rhetorical sleight of hand. The word spy conjures up cartoons of men in pork-pie hats and long raincoats following some traitor in a car. The word is loaded with cold war imagery. It reminds people of a time when there was an "us" vs a "them" and spying was a very small scale and targeted activity done against "them" or, at very least, those of "us" working for "them".
We need a new word to describe what's going on in todays world. Spying doesn't even come close to being the right word. How about totalitarian surveillance? But even that isn't strong enough to communicate the reality we are living in.
In today's reality there's no us vs them. There's no good vs evil, capitalism vs communism. There's just bureaucrats and their power, exercised over their own people as readily as over foreigners.
This is not only not "one of those things governments are supposed to do", it's often one of those things governments are expressly prohibited from doing by their own laws. And that's for good reasons!
Please, don't flatter the NSA by calling them spies. They aren't spies at this point. They are real life equivalents of O'Brien, the dedicated agent of totalitarian control in 1984. O'Brien is a far darker and scarier character than anyone who could be described as a spy.
Why is it "evil" for Iran to want a nuclear bomb, given that Israel and the USA both hate them, and have lots?
BTW the USA treats anyone who holds any Iranian rial as having "illegal earnings" and punishes them severely.
The ability to instantly and unilaterally declassify anything, without any fear of retribution.
Fat chance.
A couple of problems here. Firstly a lot of those stories refer to an event in 2008, and Der Spiegel claims GCHQ only got access to Belgacom in 2010. So their spying cannot have been relevant there.
Secondly, the evidence in those cases was the sort of thing that can be obtained using ordinary court orders or ordinary, limited and carefully controlled wiretaps. The people targeted went to the Afghan-Pakistani border for months and according to one article, some of them were already known criminals in Belgium even before then. Getting a tight, time limited court order for surveillance of these people within Belgium is easily possible - at no point would Britain hacking Belgium have been helpful in such a prosecution and indeed, would have been dangerous - if the evidence was obtained without a warrant and defence counsel found out, the case might have collapsed.
I strongly dislike this notion that the acts Snowden uncovered are all OK because occasionally, the authorities do manage to catch terrorists. Guess what? They also catch random serial killers, fraudsters, drunk drivers who do hit and runs, all kinds of other criminals .... just using the ordinary tools and strict supervision they are supposed to operate under. Where's the evidence that tightly specified, time limited court orders issued by open courts are insufficient? Can you point me to just one case of a terrorist who successfully blew himself up because a judge mistakenly denied a reasonable warrant request? I've not heard of such a thing, even though occasional mistakes would be expected and not by itself sufficient to conclude what the NSA/GCHQ does is necessary.
I suppose the way it can work is this - after a reasonable if not rich life style, they lose a job and lose the apartment. They now get food stamps, but it's not quite enough to live off each months, so they end up living on the street. Due to the lack of rent payments, they now have enough money from social security to buy OK food and drinks. They still have laptop and phone from before things went south, even though they might not be able to afford a new one.
It's worse than that. Yes, you need some kind of an address to get a bank account thanks to stricter AML laws passed in the PATRIOT Act.
However, if you spend a while in the cash economy, when you do get back on your feet many banks will refuse to take your cash as a deposit. Because they don't know how you got that cash, they are afraid of being considered money launderers by allowing you to deposit it. So once people fall out of the banking system it can be hard to get back in, which then in turn keeps these people down (and more likely to be criminals). All in the name of fighting the terrorists.
By the way, the US government knows the power of being evicted from the financial system full well. That's why they're starting to enforce US law internationally even though they can't jail people outside their borders. Instead of jail the punishment they use is being blacklisted from the financial system and having all your bank accounts closed. If you're a middle class guy with a home, a mortgage, kids etc and one day banks stop wanting to deal with you because you pissed off the US, then you could find yourself on the street faster than you might think. After all, what are you going to do when your bank accounts get closed - take out your life savings and pension as cash?
I think you over-estimate how difficult it is to use Bitcoin. Here's what they have to do:
1) Install app on phone (perhaps a charity case, or perhaps one they had before they lost their home)
2) Retype Bitcoin address from screen to laptop when receiving money for "microwork tasks" like spamming YouTube
3) There is no step 3.
Alternatively, step 2 can be "show someone the qrcode on your screen to receive money in person". Anyone can do it.
Can you give a cite for that? It's hard to imagine any country deliberately banning all charity, especially one as enlightened as Finland.
Fortunately, despite the name, it seems BountySource also supports fundraisers aka Kickstarter-style schemes aka "assurance contracts". We know from Kickstarter that this model can scale to very large investments, when the project leaders are credible and there are lots of people who want something done. Unfortunately Kickstarter has a very narrow focus, so it's really great to see someone step up and create a competitor focused on the open source world. If I didn't already have a job I'd definitely consider experimenting with funding myself this way.
I think there are two technologies coming up that could help this situation somewhat. Although they're both a bit exotic currently.
The first one is Bitcoin proofs of sacrifice. The basic idea here is that you can obtain some Bitcoin via whatever means, and then sacrifice it (to miner fees) in such a way that you can create a data structure containing a public key which also proves that you threw that money away. Poof - you just created an anonymous "identity" that had a specific cost and that you therefore do not wish to lose. By adding this proof (or hash of the proof) to shared blacklists, you can then be banned from various sites. If you really really want to get back in, you can of course make a new sacrifice - but it could get expensive fast. People who behave can re-use their non banned proof at lots of websites and may never need to make a new one.
The second technology is called SCIP/TinyRAM and it allows you to generate a proof that some arbitrary computation was done correctly, where some of the inputs to that computation can be private. For example, you can take some rare and difficult to obtain object - like your NFC enabled passport - and then run a provable computation that verifies the signed cert chain stored inside the chip. The passport data is a private input. The output of the program is a hash of the passport and the fact that it was valid (signature chains were correct). This "proof" is then used as above - you can send it to websites who can then ban you if they wish, but they never learn your real identity. The bans stick because you can't easily obtain a new identity from the passport office.
I prefer the Bitcoin approach because it sets a market for abuse ... if you screw up and get banned in a lot of places, you can get a second chance by spending money. With the passport approach it can theoretically be done using any NFC enabled Android smartphone, so it's more accessible, but you only get once chance unless bans expire after a time period.
Has anyone ever discovered that feature without someone else telling them about it? I'm guessing the answer is no.
That's not what the article actually says. What it says is that the murder rate in the USA is much higher in general (it makes no mention of gang warfare), but that the mugging rate is lower than in Europe. Perhaps because people get shot instead of mugged instead?
Also, although it's a minor issue, I take umbrage with your phrasing of the first statement. It can be read to imply that violent crime in the USA is somehow doing better than normal. In fact violent crime rates have fallen everywhere in lockstep with phasing out of leaded petrol. The US has merely followed that trend, as would be expected from a phenomenon rooted in heavy metal poisoning.
So essentially what we have is that violent crime fell everywhere, including the USA, but in America muggings are generally replaced with shootings.
It has "force projection ability". It simply doesn't care to use it.
I'm a Brit who lives in central Europe. So, if you have a point, I'm not sure what it is.
Europe isn't it like it was in the first part of the 20th century. There are no former, broken empires having massive war reparations extracted from them right on Britain's doorstep. There are no charismatic leaders with radically nationalistic talk. Russia isn't going to invade Europe anytime soon. Neither is China. In the event that the world undergoes radical political change, there will be plenty of warning and time to engage in an arms race.
The country that has most extra-territorial control over Europe is the USA. Russia and China do not explicitly threaten or indeed engage in warfare of any kind against Europeans. The USA has actually passed laws that will automatically bankrupt any financial institution anywhere that does not comply with US law. If US law conflicts with local law, tough.
If there's ANY country that Europe might need to defend itself against in the forseeable future, it's the USA. Against military attack? Probably not. Against other forms of attack? It already happens.
Europe has plenty enough military capability for its needs. France and the UK spend a disproportionate amount of money on their militaries. I really doubt military protection even crosses the minds of politicians in Europe.
Politicians roll over for a variety of reasons. One is that some of them have the same worldview as the most hawkish members of Congress. Look at how Cameron and some other senior Tory MP's were salivating over the idea of bombing the shit out of Syria. The disappointment at the no vote was obviously not faked, they genuinely felt like that. It's an age thing - politicians skew old and older people tend to have more aggressive foreign policy views than younger people do (at the moment).
Another reason is that they understand the political situation in the USA all too well. The USA does not have friends, or allies. The "special relationship" crap the UK government is fond of trotting out fools nobody, which is confirmed by polling. In the Congressional mindset there exists only two worlds, domestic and foreign. That means the USA won't even hesitate to apply the same brutal economic strategies it applies to Iran to other countries, if those countries were to step out of line. As FATCA rolls out parliaments around the world are learning this one the hard way and are being forced to change their own laws to avoid Iran's fate. The USA has announced to the world that you're either with them or against them, and if you're against them, you'll be treated no differently to any other "rogue state". If the sanctioned and destroyed institutions are systematically important European banks - no problem.
Understandably, European politicians do not want to go in front of their own people and say "We cannot implement this policy because the USA will impose crippling punishments on us automatically if we do", because that makes them seem weak and useless (which indeed they are). And they believe that even if a popular vote were to bring in such a policy, if it resulted in serious recession and job losses then they'd be punished for it. Whether they're right or not is hard to say. Much better to just ignore the elephant in the room, especially if they actually like the idea of seeming tough and strong and being the next Churchill.
The risk is that growing anti-Americanism (which as you observe, is in reality closer to anti-Washington-ism) will continue to be a blind spot for major political parties until it turns into a boiling over pot, just as concerns about immigration did. That leads to the possibility of parties with extremely radical policies starting to gain power, which history tells us is rarely a positive thing.
Look at what Europe does to people who oppose the USA. We're already occupied!
You think they don't monitor US transactions too? What about transactions that have one end in the USA? Or which are executed by banks which are active in the USA but technically headquartered in London? What about the data feeds they get from GCHQ?
Anyway, the constitution doesn't mention any such thing because it was inconceivable back then. There is plenty of language in the constitution that states the government should get a warrant for things that are like financial transaction data:
Note "the people". Not "US citizens" or "US persons" or "people who are geographically within the USA at the time a paper is made" but "the people". The constitution uses that language quite carefully because the authors were highly familiar with the ways governments wriggle out of rules using artificial reclassifications or redefinitions of common concepts.
Anyway, who cares? Everyone outside the USA doesn't want the NSA to watch their financial transactions, or any other foreign intelligence agency. Saying it's allowed by the law just tells everyone else that the law is inadequate. And yes that applies to the UK and other places that have industrial-scale programs that spy on ordinary citizens of other countries.
What the article actually says in the last paragraph is that there's currently a capacity shortage, that's expected to be resolved by 2015. The article also says manufacturers think they can go down another process node, and then do another 3 after that using 3D stacking. Then he says new technologies "with the speed of DRAM and the storage capacity of NAND" might make their way out of the lab next year.
Overall, the article's contents don't really seem to support the notion that it's game over for SSD capacity improvements.
I looked at the paper from CRI, they apparently did do testing on the raw (pre-whitening) entropy source on test chips that give direct access to it. Unfortunately the goal of that audit was to build confidence in the general design, the NSA wasn't an issue when that was done.
What I take away from this is - the good news is, the RDRAND circuitry has an open, well documented design which is apparently robust. Thus, if we can obtain confidence that it's not backdoored by the NSA, it's a great feature to have. Note to people talking about China, etc, Intel run all their own fabs. The chance of a technique as complicated as crypto backdoors using dopant trojans being inserted into the manufacturing process inside Intel-controlled fabs is close to zero. If it's done, it's done with the knowledge and co-operation of management.
The question is how can the world build such confidence? The standard way would be to decap some randomly chosen chips and analyze with an SEM, but I have no idea if that's feasible for something as complicated as a modern Intel core. Presumably Intel themselves can do it for debugging purposes, but whether it can be done in the absence of lots of proprietary information is unclear. Also, the output of RDRAND could presumably be patched using microcode updates, so just because the chips ship without a backdoor doesn't mean one couldn't be introduced later through a firmware/BIOS update.