> If you're quick, you can still pose questions [usc.edu] for them to answer.
"Mr. Valenti, is it true that you and Hilary Rosen were caught in flagranto delecti in a menage-a-trois with a sheep?"
(I don't care if he was or not. I just wanna hear him deny it!)
Re:Fast CPUs might be bad.
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 2
> has anyone else been telling their 'we want to get on the internet' family
and friends to buy OLD PCs?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
For those of you who have a nearby surplus store, go there.
Sample upgrades: I saw a $30 P166MMX system that happened to have an Asus TX97 motherboard. A free upgrade to the beta 0112 BIOS from the 'net. A $30 K6-2+-450 laptop chip, or a K6-3-333 are drop-in replacements for the P166MMX, and offer performance comparable to a PII in the same speed range. Such a system is a great place to toss that stick of 64M PC100 SDRAM you're not using anymore, as well as that 8.4G hard drive you just replaced.
I did that upgrade for my own box and it's capable of doing all-software DVD on a cheap-azz 4M ATI TV-out card from 1996 with no DVD hardware support.
Want monitors? Surplus stores rule. I was in one yesterday and picked up a 19" Sony true-flat CRT for $120. (Pricewatch: $400-500). They had 17" Sony flat-CRTs for $70 (Pricewatch: ~$300). There were also several 21" monitors (Viewsonic P815, Pricewatch $700 new, $325 refurb) for ~$200.
Re:It doesn't look like much but...
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
> but lots of people poo-poo'ed the personal computer thing 20 years ago, and now I'm
sure they wish they hadn't.
They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Re:It doesn't look like much but...
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
> I personally would've shelled out
the money to be able to be in traffic with a Ginger instead of my pig of a car that
...doesn't mean instant death on impact with other cars?
...shelters you from the rain and snow?
...goes faster than 12 mph?
The only way this will "change life in big cities" is if you can force everyone to live within a mile or two of where they work. (For the 80% of us who live >=10 miles away from work, we spend $3000 on a shitbox used car, and arrive 15-20 minutes later, dry and warm, or $3000 on a nifty scooter, and spend about an hour in the wind, rain, and snow to get to work.)
Unfortunately for would-be social engineers masquerading as transportation engineers, a large proportion of the population doesn't like living in high-rise apartment buildings, and does like living in either suburbia or the wide-open countryside.
Prediction: Ginger is a flash in the pan and forgotten within a year.
Corollary: When you need to trot out Steve Jobs and other $BIG_NAME tech celebrities as being impressed with your new toy, and you trot them out in every press release (funny how the "reports" on IT on all the mainstream news sites are the same, huh?), you have nothing new to offer, and are merely blowing smoke in the hopes of creating enough "buzz" to start a fad and make a quick buck.
Anyone see our cities transformed by the 1999 fad of Razor scooters? Anyone? Bueller?
A blimp named Hindenburg, a car named Edsel, and a security officer named...
No, wait a minute, this guy's credentials make it sound like he might actually be qualified to do the job, in that he at least understands security.
Perhaps the reason he's leaving for the White House is that, unlike his career MSFT, he might actually be able to implement security.
My only worry is that maybe he's worked at Micros~1 for too long and absorbed too much of its culture when it comes to security.
I mean, I can see the design meeting now -- "Well, we'd like to have the aircraft cockpit doors locked, but that'd increase security at the expense of ease of use. How 'bout we make 'em open automatically with a proximity sensor like they do in Star Trek? That'd be easy to use, and look real cool! And because the door wouldn't make the right sound by itself, we'd have to use WinXP Embedded in the door to play back a 'swish' sound like in the old Trek series. Yeah, I know that could be done with at $3.99 single-chip solution, but my way would sell at least one XP license per airplane! If that works, we could do all doors at all airports, even the normally-locked ones that go to the secured areas! Wouldn't that sell a lot of XP licenses?")
> Your retina is sensitive beyond the normal blue, but the lens absorbs it. People with a lens
replacement (my father for instance) can see further into the blue spectrum. These slight-UV thingies which are
used to make the flourescent marks in banknotes glow? My dad can see a blue light shining around the device,
which you and I cannot.
Y'know, that sounds cool enough that I'm actually looking forward to getting old and needing the relevant surgery.;-)
> Hmm... magic lantern 'released' and then the "BADTRANS.E" virus comes out, which, by coincedence installs a
keylogger on everyone's machine... CNN runs the story, people install the patch, and voila, simple misdirection and
lots of people have Magic Lantern voluntarily installed on their machine... call me paranoid...
Funny, I never thought of that, but I did think the original SirCam was an attempt by some d00d to get people in the financial industry to unwittingly leak insider information.
> Have you ever heard of Echelon? it's not a conspiracy theory, it's a fact. I don't see how they could pass up using magic
lantern for the same sort of things.
You just made some spook's day -- somewhere at NSA headquarters, there's a guy cutting-and-pasting that and mailing it to his friends on an NSA-internal humor mailing list.
And if that didn't elicit a guffaw or two, maybe this will:
NSA geeks have probably already used Echelon to obtain 0-day copies of Magic Lantern, insert the string "seineew era sreenigne i3f" into the executable, and shoved it back onto FBI's network, all without the feebz ever knowing they've been 0wned.
> Or... perhaps it's just delivered to his machine as an application or operating system upgrade. All it takes is a verified IP in the right
upgrade engine, and a 'different' upgrade is sent than most get, or perhaps even see.
>
You usually even click to agree to allow the upgrade to happen, thus, consent. Admittedly, not very informed consent, but... consent none
the less.
Moral of the story. Read that EULA carefully. *evil grin*
Actually, infiltrating an ISP or Micros~1 Windows Update and having them deliver ML to certain IP address ranges upon the presence/absence of certain GUIDs, MAC addresses, WinXP registration data, or other methods of identification, would be a seriously cool hack, almost on a par with the Hughes "GAMEOVER" hack against satellite card h4x0rz.
(Remember, even if you disapprove of ML, you don't have to like a technique to admire it;-)
Wild-ass speculation: The FBI has no such warez yet, but issued a press release to the effect that they did, in order to get ideas from d00dz like us on what sorts of things would, or wouldn't work. If that's the case (and I suppose we'll know in 50 years when it's all declassified), I'd also have to add "social engineering hack par excellence" to whatever technical solution they devise.
> And also, what happens if some hacker gets hold of this magic lantern software and has some fun pretending to
be the FBI?
If the FBI's sending it out, I doubt they'll be sending it out to hackers. Skr1pt k1ddi3z, maybe, but not hackers. The last thing they'd want is for someone to reverse-engineer it.
Remember, the perp has to be dumb enough to run it or otherwise get himself 0wned in order for it to be effective. If deployed, it'll be against soft targets, not hard targets.
> The big deal, really, is that the FBI shouldn't be writing virii. Either they politely ask, 'can we violate your security,' or they politely ask,
'can we break into your home.' "Cloak and dagger" should not be their MO, "implicit permission" is unacceptable.
"Hello! We send you this file in order to have your PGP passphrase!".
> It's analagous to the "war on drugs" -- people willingly bend over and allow [... ]
You made my point for me. Rightly or wrongly, whether required under law or not, people willingly. allow. it.
If people are willingly cooperating, then we can keep the Fourth as-is, and send the cops to knock on doors and ask. (In the same sense that an officer can ask, but not demand, to search your vehicle after pulling you over for a busted tail light.) Those who with to cooperate, can. Those who don't, can choose not to.
Choosing not to cooperate doesn't by itself constitute probable cause, but there's no reason why a quick search of their list of email contacts after they've chosen not to cooperate couldn't be done. (This is again analagous to the traffic stop question -- if the guy pulled over for a busted tail light is pulled over in a neighborhood known to the officer to have high street crime, and the guy pulled over has a string of priors a mile long, or is known to the officer to spend a lot of time hanging out with gang members or hiring prostitutes, or has other links to street crime, the officer more than likely has probable cause.)
If the search turns up no suspects, no problem. We've found a conscientious objector to the new rules, but there's no reason to return to his or her home. If, however, the search turns up regular correspondence with three suspected and six known criminals with prior convictions, then the evidence should be presented to a judge and a warrant obtained on the grounds that there's now reason to believe that the alleged conscientious objector may be aiding and abetting the enemy.
I don't get all the objections to the FBI spyware thingy. Nor do I get the notion that it's somehow as intrusive as even the sneak-and-peek thing they did against that mobster a few months ago.
In the case of Scarfo (the mob guy), the Fedz had to break into
the guy's home and h4x0r his b0x3n with a hardware device. Obvious
case of the Fedz breaching the mobster's right to be secure in his
home and property.
In the case of Magic Lantern, they'll do it from their office.
It'll be up to the target to do the st00pid thing and run the
executable. I can see an argument that by voluntarily running
trojanned code, he gives up his right to security.
That is, it's not the Feds breaking into the guy's home, it's the
Feds sending the user an email. If the user doesn't run it, the
user remains safe. If the user chooses to run it, he violates his
own security *on behalf of* the Feds. This may be the crucial
legal distinction that makes this work in court, where the Scarfo
keylogger didn't.
(And besides, isn't this what half the/. crowd says when the latest
Microsoft worm-du-jour shows up? "Well, they were running Windoze,
they shouldn't expect to be secure!";-)
Finally, I don't see what the worry is about virus scanners not detecting it.
This is *not* a worm, nor is it a virus. That is, it doesn't try
to spread to other computers over a network, nor through infecting
files (remember, its goal is to *avoid* changing anything on the
target system, to preserve the integrity of the evidence), so
there's no risk of collateral damage.
So you have a data collector that doesn't damage data, and doesn't
replicate. Since it doesn't replicate, it doesn't leave the
infected system. Since it never leaves the infected system,
the number of copies of Magic Lantern "in the wild" will always
be a small number - likely, "one per suspect".
Since it doesn't exist in the wild, doesn't propagate, and since
each instance of it may be unique, there's really no way for a virus
scanning company to add its signature to a database, even if they
needed or wanted to.
And on that "one copy per suspect" note, because it doesn't need to
propagate beyond the infected system, I would guess that it's likely
to be an executable tailored to the target machine - which may imply
different checksums/signatures, and very probably, different "bait"
email messages, tailored to the suspect.
Suppose we decide to use a 'sploit based on Javashit embedded in PDFs.
We'd send a PDF of plans for a meth lab to our suspect drug kingpin,
and PDFs of the You-Know-Who's "Jihad-HOWTO on CD-ROM" to our suspect
terrorists.
OK, so we probably have come up with a totally different infection vector when Adobe calls up and
contracts us to perform a hit on m0st-ph33r3d c0pywr1t3 t3rr0r1st Dmitry
Sklyarov, but for most dirtbags, it'll work...
> Why stop with the 4th amendment? Why not just abolish the whole !@#$ Constitution and declare GW Bush as King, and Ashcroft his
Chief Advisor!
The point is that we have a process for amending the Constitution -- if indeed the Fourth, as originally drafted, is no longer relevant in today's society, let's - as a society - say so, and pass a replacement in the House and Senate by a 2/3 majority, and let 3/4 of the states ratify it.
Something like this:
"[Proposed Amendment 28]:
1. The Fourth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States, is hereby repealed.
2. Except in times of national emergency, 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 or Executive order, supported by Oath, affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things
to be seized.
3. The President shall have the power to declare a state of national emergency.
4. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Indeed, I would argue that we could do the same for the appropriate sections of amendments V, VI, VII, and VIII. Hell, we might even clarify what we meant by II in the process.
Can't drum up enough popular support in both houses and the State legislatures? The original amendments stand.
But if there is support among the public, as expressed through their elected legislators, for trading liberty for security, then such an amendment would demonstrate it. Such a move would be highly preferable to the current situation of undermining Constitutional protections without such a demonstration. We have a process for amending the Constitution; why not use it?
> video rental records, explicitly protected by Congress after
the Bork confirmation hearings
I still say the best thing we could do for privacy would be to expose a senator's pr0n-surfing habits through a leak of his Doubleclick data profile.
(For those who don't remember Bork - the issue during his confirmation hearings was that his political opponents snarfed video rental records to show that he rented naughty videotapes. As soon as someone important had their privacy violated, a law to protect it was created.)
> how many lawyers does it take... to stuff the genie back into the bottle?
Never mind that.
How many genies, at three wishes apiece, will it take to stuff all the lawyers into a bottle?
(keeping in mind that you'll need to save one wish for last - that the bottle, still containing its lawyers, fall past the event horizon of a 14-solar-mass black hole.)
> Now, can you say "Richard Nixon and the IRS"? How about "J. Edger Hoover and Martin Luther
King"? "My Lai"? Any clearer?
Leaving aside Nixon and Hoover, I point out that Calley was tried and convicted. (And as far as Hoover goes, think of how little oversight there'd be on the FBI were it not for the bad PR from COINTELPRO?)
> [e911 / 10m tracking] Which means that if you care about privacy you'll want to
figure out which traces to cut in your phone to disconnect the GPS.
...or, at the rate at which companies are giving away phones these days, which traces to leech off and hook up to your laptop if you want a free-as-in-beer, compact, attractively-packaged GPS receiver! Woohoo!
> [the strawman of police entering one's home without probable cause or warrant] is a reduction in the citezens basic rights. My argument is that placing cameras in public areas in no way reduces your rights. It does however give the police a better chance of catching criminals on tape.
Although what you say is true, would it not be preferable to simply put more police in public areas?
Given the choice between being mugged and the mugger getting away with it, being mugged on camera and the mugger maybe being identified and captured a few weeks after I emerge from the hospital, or not being mugged at all because there's a cop on the street corner, I'll take the latter.
> If I recall correctly, one of our founding fathers (Ben?) said that governments must be completely overhauled
every 200 years to eliminate damage by corruption..
Most people support the changes since 9/11. Perhaps this is the overhaul - a realization that the Constitution isn't a suicide pact, and a realizing that regardless of the intent of the Founders, it is a living document. The Founders aren't here; it's up to us to make sense of it.
I'd feel better if our politicians would simply do it honestly - by passing an amendment to repeal the Fourth (in much the same way as they repealed Prohibition), but if the people have agreed that it's preferable to trade a little liberty in order to obtain security by living in a Panopticon (most people have done so already - with "loyalty cards" and privacy-invaders like Doubleclick, the DMA already knows more about most people than the government ever will!), and want this to be done quickly (that is, without an amendment repealing the Fourth), then this is arguably the only way to do it.
> it was the PATRIOT Act,
what kind of un-American bastard wouldn't vote for something called the PATRIOT Act?
Which reminds me about the disturbing trend in naming legislation over the past 10 years or so. There's the PATRIOT act, which we're discussing here. It's not just a US phenomenon, though - witness the UK's effective removal all regulations on investigators with the "Regulation of Investigatory Powers" act.
All I know is that when they come up with the "Saving Our Children's Cuddly Kittens, Sad-Eyed Puppies, and Fluffy Bunnies" act, I'm getting the fsck outa dodge.
> The people who don't have Internet connections are surely criminals. They must have something to hide,
otherwise they would be gouged with outrageous prices and restrictions in order to be further monitored.
Hey! My grandma resembles that remark! Just 'cuz she uses AOL doesn't mean she isn't being price-gouged and monitored along with the rest of us!
Slashdot Mirror
"Mr. Valenti, is it true that you and Hilary Rosen were caught in flagranto delecti in a menage-a-trois with a sheep?"
(I don't care if he was or not. I just wanna hear him deny it!)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
For those of you who have a nearby surplus store, go there.
Sample upgrades: I saw a $30 P166MMX system that happened to have an Asus TX97 motherboard. A free upgrade to the beta 0112 BIOS from the 'net. A $30 K6-2+-450 laptop chip, or a K6-3-333 are drop-in replacements for the P166MMX, and offer performance comparable to a PII in the same speed range. Such a system is a great place to toss that stick of 64M PC100 SDRAM you're not using anymore, as well as that 8.4G hard drive you just replaced.
I did that upgrade for my own box and it's capable of doing all-software DVD on a cheap-azz 4M ATI TV-out card from 1996 with no DVD hardware support.
Want monitors? Surplus stores rule. I was in one yesterday and picked up a 19" Sony true-flat CRT for $120. (Pricewatch: $400-500). They had 17" Sony flat-CRTs for $70 (Pricewatch: ~$300). There were also several 21" monitors (Viewsonic P815, Pricewatch $700 new, $325 refurb) for ~$200.
They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Galileo. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
The only way this will "change life in big cities" is if you can force everyone to live within a mile or two of where they work. (For the 80% of us who live >=10 miles away from work, we spend $3000 on a shitbox used car, and arrive 15-20 minutes later, dry and warm, or $3000 on a nifty scooter, and spend about an hour in the wind, rain, and snow to get to work.)
Unfortunately for would-be social engineers masquerading as transportation engineers, a large proportion of the population doesn't like living in high-rise apartment buildings, and does like living in either suburbia or the wide-open countryside.
Prediction: Ginger is a flash in the pan and forgotten within a year.
Corollary: When you need to trot out Steve Jobs and other $BIG_NAME tech celebrities as being impressed with your new toy, and you trot them out in every press release (funny how the "reports" on IT on all the mainstream news sites are the same, huh?), you have nothing new to offer, and are merely blowing smoke in the hopes of creating enough "buzz" to start a fad and make a quick buck.
Anyone see our cities transformed by the 1999 fad of Razor scooters? Anyone? Bueller?
A blimp named Hindenburg, a car named Edsel, and a security officer named...
No, wait a minute, this guy's credentials make it sound like he might actually be qualified to do the job, in that he at least understands security.
Perhaps the reason he's leaving for the White House is that, unlike his career MSFT, he might actually be able to implement security.
My only worry is that maybe he's worked at Micros~1 for too long and absorbed too much of its culture when it comes to security.
I mean, I can see the design meeting now -- "Well, we'd like to have the aircraft cockpit doors locked, but that'd increase security at the expense of ease of use. How 'bout we make 'em open automatically with a proximity sensor like they do in Star Trek? That'd be easy to use, and look real cool! And because the door wouldn't make the right sound by itself, we'd have to use WinXP Embedded in the door to play back a 'swish' sound like in the old Trek series. Yeah, I know that could be done with at $3.99 single-chip solution, but my way would sell at least one XP license per airplane! If that works, we could do all doors at all airports, even the normally-locked ones that go to the secured areas! Wouldn't that sell a lot of XP licenses?")
something awful, but they are part of NASA's mission.
s/money//g
Those that love sausage and respect the law should never see either being made.
Y'know, that sounds cool enough that I'm actually looking forward to getting old and needing the relevant surgery. ;-)
Funny, I never thought of that, but I did think the original SirCam was an attempt by some d00d to get people in the financial industry to unwittingly leak insider information.
Two kinds of sysadmins. Paranoids and losers.
You just made some spook's day -- somewhere at NSA headquarters, there's a guy cutting-and-pasting that and mailing it to his friends on an NSA-internal humor mailing list.
And if that didn't elicit a guffaw or two, maybe this will:
NSA geeks have probably already used Echelon to obtain 0-day copies of Magic Lantern, insert the string "seineew era sreenigne i3f" into the executable, and shoved it back onto FBI's network, all without the feebz ever knowing they've been 0wned.
(Score: +1, FunNO CARRIER)
> You usually even click to agree to allow the upgrade to happen, thus, consent. Admittedly, not very informed consent, but... consent none the less.
Moral of the story. Read that EULA carefully. *evil grin*
Actually, infiltrating an ISP or Micros~1 Windows Update and having them deliver ML to certain IP address ranges upon the presence/absence of certain GUIDs, MAC addresses, WinXP registration data, or other methods of identification, would be a seriously cool hack, almost on a par with the Hughes "GAMEOVER" hack against satellite card h4x0rz.
(Remember, even if you disapprove of ML, you don't have to like a technique to admire it ;-)
Wild-ass speculation: The FBI has no such warez yet, but issued a press release to the effect that they did, in order to get ideas from d00dz like us on what sorts of things would, or wouldn't work. If that's the case (and I suppose we'll know in 50 years when it's all declassified), I'd also have to add "social engineering hack par excellence" to whatever technical solution they devise.
If the FBI's sending it out, I doubt they'll be sending it out to hackers. Skr1pt k1ddi3z, maybe, but not hackers. The last thing they'd want is for someone to reverse-engineer it.
Remember, the perp has to be dumb enough to run it or otherwise get himself 0wned in order for it to be effective. If deployed, it'll be against soft targets, not hard targets.
"Hello! We send you this file in order to have your PGP passphrase!".
C'mon, what could be more polite than that? ;-)
You made my point for me. Rightly or wrongly, whether required under law or not, people willingly. allow. it.
If people are willingly cooperating, then we can keep the Fourth as-is, and send the cops to knock on doors and ask. (In the same sense that an officer can ask, but not demand, to search your vehicle after pulling you over for a busted tail light.) Those who with to cooperate, can. Those who don't, can choose not to.
Choosing not to cooperate doesn't by itself constitute probable cause, but there's no reason why a quick search of their list of email contacts after they've chosen not to cooperate couldn't be done. (This is again analagous to the traffic stop question -- if the guy pulled over for a busted tail light is pulled over in a neighborhood known to the officer to have high street crime, and the guy pulled over has a string of priors a mile long, or is known to the officer to spend a lot of time hanging out with gang members or hiring prostitutes, or has other links to street crime, the officer more than likely has probable cause.)
If the search turns up no suspects, no problem. We've found a conscientious objector to the new rules, but there's no reason to return to his or her home. If, however, the search turns up regular correspondence with three suspected and six known criminals with prior convictions, then the evidence should be presented to a judge and a warrant obtained on the grounds that there's now reason to believe that the alleged conscientious objector may be aiding and abetting the enemy.
In the case of Scarfo (the mob guy), the Fedz had to break into the guy's home and h4x0r his b0x3n with a hardware device. Obvious case of the Fedz breaching the mobster's right to be secure in his home and property.
In the case of Magic Lantern, they'll do it from their office. It'll be up to the target to do the st00pid thing and run the executable. I can see an argument that by voluntarily running trojanned code, he gives up his right to security.
That is, it's not the Feds breaking into the guy's home, it's the Feds sending the user an email. If the user doesn't run it, the user remains safe. If the user chooses to run it, he violates his own security *on behalf of* the Feds. This may be the crucial legal distinction that makes this work in court, where the Scarfo keylogger didn't.
(And besides, isn't this what half the /. crowd says when the latest
Microsoft worm-du-jour shows up? "Well, they were running Windoze,
they shouldn't expect to be secure!" ;-)
Finally, I don't see what the worry is about virus scanners not detecting it.
This is *not* a worm, nor is it a virus. That is, it doesn't try to spread to other computers over a network, nor through infecting files (remember, its goal is to *avoid* changing anything on the target system, to preserve the integrity of the evidence), so there's no risk of collateral damage.
So you have a data collector that doesn't damage data, and doesn't replicate. Since it doesn't replicate, it doesn't leave the infected system. Since it never leaves the infected system, the number of copies of Magic Lantern "in the wild" will always be a small number - likely, "one per suspect".
Since it doesn't exist in the wild, doesn't propagate, and since each instance of it may be unique, there's really no way for a virus scanning company to add its signature to a database, even if they needed or wanted to.
And on that "one copy per suspect" note, because it doesn't need to propagate beyond the infected system, I would guess that it's likely to be an executable tailored to the target machine - which may imply different checksums/signatures, and very probably, different "bait" email messages, tailored to the suspect.
Suppose we decide to use a 'sploit based on Javashit embedded in PDFs. We'd send a PDF of plans for a meth lab to our suspect drug kingpin, and PDFs of the You-Know-Who's "Jihad-HOWTO on CD-ROM" to our suspect terrorists.
OK, so we probably have come up with a totally different infection vector when Adobe calls up and contracts us to perform a hit on m0st-ph33r3d c0pywr1t3 t3rr0r1st Dmitry Sklyarov, but for most dirtbags, it'll work...
The point is that we have a process for amending the Constitution -- if indeed the Fourth, as originally drafted, is no longer relevant in today's society, let's - as a society - say so, and pass a replacement in the House and Senate by a 2/3 majority, and let 3/4 of the states ratify it.
Something like this:
Indeed, I would argue that we could do the same for the appropriate sections of amendments V, VI, VII, and VIII. Hell, we might even clarify what we meant by II in the process.
Can't drum up enough popular support in both houses and the State legislatures? The original amendments stand.
But if there is support among the public, as expressed through their elected legislators, for trading liberty for security, then such an amendment would demonstrate it. Such a move would be highly preferable to the current situation of undermining Constitutional protections without such a demonstration. We have a process for amending the Constitution; why not use it?
I still say the best thing we could do for privacy would be to expose a senator's pr0n-surfing habits through a leak of his Doubleclick data profile.
(For those who don't remember Bork - the issue during his confirmation hearings was that his political opponents snarfed video rental records to show that he rented naughty videotapes. As soon as someone important had their privacy violated, a law to protect it was created.)
Never mind that.
How many genies, at three wishes apiece, will it take to stuff all the lawyers into a bottle?
(keeping in mind that you'll need to save one wish for last - that the bottle, still containing its lawyers, fall past the event horizon of a 14-solar-mass black hole.)
If there's a bubblecam underneath a pigeon, I truly pity the poor bastard who has to operate it all day long.
Leaving aside Nixon and Hoover, I point out that Calley was tried and convicted. (And as far as Hoover goes, think of how little oversight there'd be on the FBI were it not for the bad PR from COINTELPRO?)
Sometimes, the system does work.
Although what you say is true, would it not be preferable to simply put more police in public areas?
Given the choice between being mugged and the mugger getting away with it, being mugged on camera and the mugger maybe being identified and captured a few weeks after I emerge from the hospital, or not being mugged at all because there's a cop on the street corner, I'll take the latter.
Most people support the changes since 9/11. Perhaps this is the overhaul - a realization that the Constitution isn't a suicide pact, and a realizing that regardless of the intent of the Founders, it is a living document. The Founders aren't here; it's up to us to make sense of it.
I'd feel better if our politicians would simply do it honestly - by passing an amendment to repeal the Fourth (in much the same way as they repealed Prohibition), but if the people have agreed that it's preferable to trade a little liberty in order to obtain security by living in a Panopticon (most people have done so already - with "loyalty cards" and privacy-invaders like Doubleclick, the DMA already knows more about most people than the government ever will!), and want this to be done quickly (that is, without an amendment repealing the Fourth), then this is arguably the only way to do it.
Which reminds me about the disturbing trend in naming legislation over the past 10 years or so. There's the PATRIOT act, which we're discussing here. It's not just a US phenomenon, though - witness the UK's effective removal all regulations on investigators with the "Regulation of Investigatory Powers" act.
All I know is that when they come up with the "Saving Our Children's Cuddly Kittens, Sad-Eyed Puppies, and Fluffy Bunnies" act, I'm getting the fsck outa dodge.
Hey! My grandma resembles that remark! Just 'cuz she uses AOL doesn't mean she isn't being price-gouged and monitored along with the rest of us!