You might want to google Lafayette. Without the French, their fleet, money, and other support, GB might well have been the victor in the Revolutionary War. In that light, the French jokes aren't really all that funny.
It's really hard to know how universally safe tor is. Maybe it protects you against Chile but not the NSA. Obviously, the Feds have a lot of money and can deploy a lot of tor systems. Shifting the discussion a little bit, from anonymity to privacy, I'm basically skeptical of all technological means at maintaining privacy, for several reasons: 1) it's super easy to screw up and leak information (this bomb hoax being a prime example). 2) Encryption acts more as temporary barrier because inevitably, it is cracked or technology makes brute force trivial (and before someone says "one time pad," figure out how that's going to work for everyday stuff). 3) It leads to rampant paranoia, for example, the people behind tor are probably good privacy minded people and not some NSA pricks -- but I don't know. Not knowing whether a system is safe or not has a chilling effect on free expression. Of course, Greenwald and Snowden suggest tor, but I'm sure that's just one stage of a multilevel system.
I'm not advocating abandoning encryption etc., but I think that without strong legal protections which make privacy violations a serious crime, even if done by the Feds, we will never really have privacy (which is a necessary component of freedom). Instead, we'll have technological systems that people trust for a time until someone gets burned and then we'll shift to other systems. But that's not a real solution and it will suck mightily for those sacrificial lambs who get roasted.
You spent a lot of effort on this post, but you need to study tor a bit more. It's a collection of services and protocols. You might as well as talk about sending a subpoena to email. There is no email entity -- it's a collection of services and protocols. There are developers who write the programs that people can use either themselves or more commonly through a third party provider of email services (that third party is not "email" in an entity sense however). When you connect and use such services, it leaves obvious traces on the network. But you can't drive up to email's corporate offices -- they don't exist.
That's what happened to this guy, he used tor on the Harvard network, and the FBI probably just went and interviewed everyone who was using tor around the time of the emails. He was given a Miranda warning, ignored it, and then he caved. Case closed.
I think the main takeaway here is that sometimes, being anonymous makes you stick out like a sore thumb.
Lesson 4, avoiding video surveillance in the Starbucks. The cops could certainly question the handful of people using a computer after figuring out who they are from the pictures. They'd probably want to focus on the person seen using a CD or USB stick with that live distro.
So do it from outside the store --- but that looks even more odd and there are cameras everywhere.
When you buy food in your city store, you are accessing a myriad government incentive programs designed to ensure that every time you go to the store, it is stocked with food rather than empty because farmers went broke, or bridges washed out, or whatnot.
I'm not so sure. Maybe you're hearing the whooshing sound because the only thing AC complained about, was "irregardless" -- which though nonstandard, was actually spelled correctly and used as it normally is used. This distinguishes it from the other terms which were phonetic misuses of familiar phrases. So maybe it was a subtle riff on the previous joke. If so, it was deep. Then again, maybe not. It's pretty hard to tell here.
The reason I gave up any sort of connection originally was because I'd wake up on a weekend, and then mindlessly flip channels never finding anything I wanted to watch, and feeling frustrated. I wasted a lot of beautiful days in this fashion. Kind of like how a heroin addict has to give it up completely, I decided I didn't want to waste my life watching stuff that was bad to begin with, and worse, interspersed with commercials.
So anyway, yes, I pay a little more for my internet but I only watch what I actually want to watch, and I watch it on my schedule. The few extra bucks are worth it to me because like any hardcore drug addict, if I had TV I'd watch it, hate it, waste time, feel frustrated, and not be able to stop. I'm simply not able to be a casual watcher -- even when I go to friends' places, if they have the TV on, I just get totally sucked in and mesmerized by it. For people who can use it reasonably, it makes a lot of sense to save a few bucks. For me though, that would be a disaster.
I've not had broadcast/cable TV access since 1992 (I did have a VCR, then a DVD, now it's just Netflix or iTunes as a last resort -- commercial free rocks, always has always will).
I don't have a facebook account (nor My Space, nor Geocities). I mean, I did have one once upon a time but never used it, forgot both my login and my password, and don't care.
Besides, any religion is as likely to be valid as the next, and "proofs" of such validity are wholly subjective, so I just wonder, why we can't we get some fun religions in America rather than the hoity-toity prudes we have?
Can someone with mod points please bomb coldfjord into the troll-land he deserves? I know I try to remember to do that when I get mod points but I've neglected it the last few times.
America needs a better decision process for when to pursue war, and when to not pursue war.
We have a decent process, it's just that it hasn't been used in more than 70 years. Congress is supposed to declare war but it let the Executive branch usurp that power. Now instead of an argument and vote, one dude makes the choice.
Senator Obama spent of all of 2007 lying his ass off. He has taken every single one of GWB's radical policies, and cemented them as the new normal. It is shocking to realize that we could have a president more cynical and abusive to American values than GWB was, but Obama proves we are just beginning to plumb those depths.
Why sadly? Seriously -- here you have a group of people doing everything in their power to undermine core American values in very salient and massive ways. They fucking deserve to be vilified. Because they're traitorous fucking villains.
Exactly, and furthermore: the snubbing, the low morale, the personal insults -- couldn't happen to a more deserving group of scum. If they want not to be considered scum, they need to quit and get a valuable, or at least a "not harmful" job. But when a person acts like Stasi, her or she should expect to be treated like shit, because it is well desrved, even if just following orders.
Most motorcycles get between 45 and 60 mpg. Almost no cars sold in America get that kind of mileage. I realize that in Europe there are efficient small diesels, we don't have those here. In Japan, efficient and cool mini-cars. We don't have those here. If you want to get 50 mpg, you need to find a 1980s era Honda CRX, or ride a motorcycle, because none of the truly interesting cars are sold in America.
It's important to remember that congress can pass no law (at least legally) that changes the meaning of The Constitution or one of its amendments.
I think Congress can expand rights, for example, as it did with the Civil Rights Act. But as far as the Third Party Doctrine goes, Congress didn't invent it. Its present incarnation Is rooted in a 1979 Supreme Court case: Smith v. Maryland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland
Essentially what happened, is that Smith robbed a woman, she reported it to the police with a description of the robber and the car he was driving. The car was noticed, its license plate taken down, and the owner and his address ascertained from registration info. At that point, the cops went to the phone company and "asked" it set up a pen register. A pen register records the numbers a person dials but does not record the audio content, i.e., it records metadata. Smith called the woman he robbed and harassed her. Then he got arrested and the question is, should the phone evidence be tossed because the cops didn't get a warrant.
Obviously, Smith is an asshole and everyone wants to see him go to jail. But if the SC tossed the evidence, he'd probably get off. By the same token, the cops were assholes too -- they certainly had enough evidence to get a warrant to put on the Pen Register but they couldn't be arsed to do it.
Ultimately, the SC held that when you share information with a third party, like the phone numbers you dial (i.e, _share_ with Ma Bell), you have no expectation of privacy and the 4th Amendment simply doesn't apply at all.
This doctrine has been applied to records most people consider extremely private: The SC has ruled that it applies to phone and bank records. There is a split in the circuit courts of appeals on cell tower location information. There are even cases in some jurisdictions applying it to medical and pharmacy records -- your doctor and your pharmacist are in fact third parties. And no, HIPPA doesn't matter. The SC hasn't ruled on these latter examples so protection depends on where you live, but you're pretty screwed in Maryland:
3. Under the third-party doctrine, Bellosi-Mitchell does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in her medical records.
In any event, the Third Party Doctrine is sort of like the Long John Silver standard -- the 4th Amendment only applies if you can maintain total secrecy, e.g., you have to kill anyone you do business with or lose your privacy rights.
The 3PD is the principal that if you share information with a third party, even if that third party promises you confidentiality, and even if that confidentiality is never actually compromised, the 4th Amendment doesn't apply and the Feds can simply demand the information willy nilly. The 3PD totally guts the 4th Amendment -- it is the basis upon which politicians can say that the NSA's masspionage is "legal". Without the 3PD, everything the NSA is doing, at least with respect to people in America, is so unconstitutional a third grader could litigate and win the case against it.
Fortunately, even Justice Sotomayer is questioning the wisdom of this rule in the modern world where everything a person does requires sharing information with third parties -- you cannot navigate the modern economy without such sharing. See the paragraph beginning on PDF page 19 for her thinking on this issue: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf
Whatever Rand Paul's faults are, he was aware of the eviscerating effect of the Third Party Doctrine and took action to protect the 4th Amendment PRIOR to the leaks. This is not the type of legislation that $megacorp loves and supports. It's a pure civil rights issue. However, I don't think his reforms don't go far enough because the only effect it would have is to exclude illegally obtained information at trial. Considering how the Feds engage in intelligence laundering, it is clear that a mere exclusion is insufficient -- there must be personal and agency penalties for a violation. To be fair to Paul, he didn't have this information when he wrote the legislation, but without personal consequences, it won't be that meaningful.
A decent example of such penalties is contained in the WA State statute regarding hidden mic recordings of conversations: See paragraphs 10 & 11: Violating the process for authorizing and recording a conversation surreptitiously, subjects the officers involved to personal prosecution for a class C felony and the agency to substantial fines ($25,000 per occurrence). The Feds need to have a little fear put into their hearts -- they need to ask themselves "If I can't do the time or pay the fine, do I really want to commit this crime?" And make no bones about it, the Federal government, due to its rampant lawlessness (e.g. collateral construction/intelligence laundering), is a criminal organization and needs to be treated as such.
Finally, back to the original point, Rand Paul might be a dick, but if you will step out of your partisan political mindset and consider the possibility that he just might have a good idea, we can get America back. Same goes for the tribal GOP -- both of you, Demoplicans and Republocrats alike, quit being so fricken tribal. The two parties are basically fungible anyway -- latch onto the very few good ideas and push them no matter who makes the proposal.
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to google Lafayette. Without the French, their fleet, money, and other support, GB might well have been the victor in the Revolutionary War. In that light, the French jokes aren't really all that funny.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_Lafayette
It's really hard to know how universally safe tor is. Maybe it protects you against Chile but not the NSA. Obviously, the Feds have a lot of money and can deploy a lot of tor systems. Shifting the discussion a little bit, from anonymity to privacy, I'm basically skeptical of all technological means at maintaining privacy, for several reasons: 1) it's super easy to screw up and leak information (this bomb hoax being a prime example). 2) Encryption acts more as temporary barrier because inevitably, it is cracked or technology makes brute force trivial (and before someone says "one time pad," figure out how that's going to work for everyday stuff). 3) It leads to rampant paranoia, for example, the people behind tor are probably good privacy minded people and not some NSA pricks -- but I don't know. Not knowing whether a system is safe or not has a chilling effect on free expression. Of course, Greenwald and Snowden suggest tor, but I'm sure that's just one stage of a multilevel system.
I'm not advocating abandoning encryption etc., but I think that without strong legal protections which make privacy violations a serious crime, even if done by the Feds, we will never really have privacy (which is a necessary component of freedom). Instead, we'll have technological systems that people trust for a time until someone gets burned and then we'll shift to other systems. But that's not a real solution and it will suck mightily for those sacrificial lambs who get roasted.
You spent a lot of effort on this post, but you need to study tor a bit more. It's a collection of services and protocols. You might as well as talk about sending a subpoena to email. There is no email entity -- it's a collection of services and protocols. There are developers who write the programs that people can use either themselves or more commonly through a third party provider of email services (that third party is not "email" in an entity sense however). When you connect and use such services, it leaves obvious traces on the network. But you can't drive up to email's corporate offices -- they don't exist.
That's what happened to this guy, he used tor on the Harvard network, and the FBI probably just went and interviewed everyone who was using tor around the time of the emails. He was given a Miranda warning, ignored it, and then he caved. Case closed.
I think the main takeaway here is that sometimes, being anonymous makes you stick out like a sore thumb.
Lesson 4, avoiding video surveillance in the Starbucks. The cops could certainly question the handful of people using a computer after figuring out who they are from the pictures. They'd probably want to focus on the person seen using a CD or USB stick with that live distro.
So do it from outside the store --- but that looks even more odd and there are cameras everywhere.
When you buy food in your city store, you are accessing a myriad government incentive programs designed to ensure that every time you go to the store, it is stocked with food rather than empty because farmers went broke, or bridges washed out, or whatnot.
I'm not so sure. Maybe you're hearing the whooshing sound because the only thing AC complained about, was "irregardless" -- which though nonstandard, was actually spelled correctly and used as it normally is used. This distinguishes it from the other terms which were phonetic misuses of familiar phrases. So maybe it was a subtle riff on the previous joke. If so, it was deep. Then again, maybe not. It's pretty hard to tell here.
Don't worry about it -- it's a mute point.
I just get the internet without TV.
The reason I gave up any sort of connection originally was because I'd wake up on a weekend, and then mindlessly flip channels never finding anything I wanted to watch, and feeling frustrated. I wasted a lot of beautiful days in this fashion. Kind of like how a heroin addict has to give it up completely, I decided I didn't want to waste my life watching stuff that was bad to begin with, and worse, interspersed with commercials.
So anyway, yes, I pay a little more for my internet but I only watch what I actually want to watch, and I watch it on my schedule. The few extra bucks are worth it to me because like any hardcore drug addict, if I had TV I'd watch it, hate it, waste time, feel frustrated, and not be able to stop. I'm simply not able to be a casual watcher -- even when I go to friends' places, if they have the TV on, I just get totally sucked in and mesmerized by it. For people who can use it reasonably, it makes a lot of sense to save a few bucks. For me though, that would be a disaster.
How's this for smug.
I've not had broadcast/cable TV access since 1992 (I did have a VCR, then a DVD, now it's just Netflix or iTunes as a last resort -- commercial free rocks, always has always will).
I don't have a facebook account (nor My Space, nor Geocities). I mean, I did have one once upon a time but never used it, forgot both my login and my password, and don't care.
To be fair, in certain times and places penises were proudly on display during political/cultural/religious events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Olympic_Games
Besides, any religion is as likely to be valid as the next, and "proofs" of such validity are wholly subjective, so I just wonder, why we can't we get some fun religions in America rather than the hoity-toity prudes we have?
Most awesome penis quote ever.
Some ideas are valuable. Some are not. Coldfjord's deserve as much derision as possible.
http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/28/nsa-has-been-spying-on-members-of-congress-for-a-long-time/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama_n_3473538.html
Interview with Russ Tice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFt22SI70DE
Can someone with mod points please bomb coldfjord into the troll-land he deserves? I know I try to remember to do that when I get mod points but I've neglected it the last few times.
Is that you Gen Alexander? Or are you Clapper?
We have a decent process, it's just that it hasn't been used in more than 70 years. Congress is supposed to declare war but it let the Executive branch usurp that power. Now instead of an argument and vote, one dude makes the choice.
Senator Obama spent of all of 2007 lying his ass off. He has taken every single one of GWB's radical policies, and cemented them as the new normal. It is shocking to realize that we could have a president more cynical and abusive to American values than GWB was, but Obama proves we are just beginning to plumb those depths.
You know what would be awesome? Standing outside the NSA gate with an enormous group of carolers singing songs to the NSA people.
We wish you a horrid xmas,
we wish you a horrid xmas,
we wish you a horrid xmas,
And cancer in the new year.
or
Silent Night, holy night, ...
signals are clear, very bright
peeping in windows or reading emails,
perving on phone calls, where's the hand cream
"vilification ... sadly"
Why sadly? Seriously -- here you have a group of people doing everything in their power to undermine core American values in very salient and massive ways. They fucking deserve to be vilified. Because they're traitorous fucking villains.
Exactly, and furthermore: the snubbing, the low morale, the personal insults -- couldn't happen to a more deserving group of scum. If they want not to be considered scum, they need to quit and get a valuable, or at least a "not harmful" job. But when a person acts like Stasi, her or she should expect to be treated like shit, because it is well desrved, even if just following orders.
2006. Seven years ago. I think that's just another data point on my suggest that none of the really interesting cars are sold in America.
What?
Most motorcycles get between 45 and 60 mpg. Almost no cars sold in America get that kind of mileage. I realize that in Europe there are efficient small diesels, we don't have those here. In Japan, efficient and cool mini-cars. We don't have those here. If you want to get 50 mpg, you need to find a 1980s era Honda CRX, or ride a motorcycle, because none of the truly interesting cars are sold in America.
So mount is bad but what about "dicked" as in, "I got dicked around by that asshole."
http://pudge.net/jesux/
Man, these guys are total fucktards:
The one positive piece of information I could find on the site was this:
I think Congress can expand rights, for example, as it did with the Civil Rights Act. But as far as the Third Party Doctrine goes, Congress didn't invent it. Its present incarnation Is rooted in a 1979 Supreme Court case: Smith v. Maryland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland
Essentially what happened, is that Smith robbed a woman, she reported it to the police with a description of the robber and the car he was driving. The car was noticed, its license plate taken down, and the owner and his address ascertained from registration info. At that point, the cops went to the phone company and "asked" it set up a pen register. A pen register records the numbers a person dials but does not record the audio content, i.e., it records metadata. Smith called the woman he robbed and harassed her. Then he got arrested and the question is, should the phone evidence be tossed because the cops didn't get a warrant.
Obviously, Smith is an asshole and everyone wants to see him go to jail. But if the SC tossed the evidence, he'd probably get off. By the same token, the cops were assholes too -- they certainly had enough evidence to get a warrant to put on the Pen Register but they couldn't be arsed to do it.
Ultimately, the SC held that when you share information with a third party, like the phone numbers you dial (i.e, _share_ with Ma Bell), you have no expectation of privacy and the 4th Amendment simply doesn't apply at all.
This doctrine has been applied to records most people consider extremely private: The SC has ruled that it applies to phone and bank records. There is a split in the circuit courts of appeals on cell tower location information. There are even cases in some jurisdictions applying it to medical and pharmacy records -- your doctor and your pharmacist are in fact third parties. And no, HIPPA doesn't matter. The SC hasn't ruled on these latter examples so protection depends on where you live, but you're pretty screwed in Maryland:
In any event, the Third Party Doctrine is sort of like the Long John Silver standard -- the 4th Amendment only applies if you can maintain total secrecy, e.g., you have to kill anyone you do business with or lose your privacy rights.
A month before the Snowden leaks began, Rand Paul proposed legislation to reform the Third Party Doctrine: http://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th/senate-bill/1037/text
The 3PD is the principal that if you share information with a third party, even if that third party promises you confidentiality, and even if that confidentiality is never actually compromised, the 4th Amendment doesn't apply and the Feds can simply demand the information willy nilly. The 3PD totally guts the 4th Amendment -- it is the basis upon which politicians can say that the NSA's masspionage is "legal". Without the 3PD, everything the NSA is doing, at least with respect to people in America, is so unconstitutional a third grader could litigate and win the case against it.
Fortunately, even Justice Sotomayer is questioning the wisdom of this rule in the modern world where everything a person does requires sharing information with third parties -- you cannot navigate the modern economy without such sharing. See the paragraph beginning on PDF page 19 for her thinking on this issue: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-1259.pdf
Whatever Rand Paul's faults are, he was aware of the eviscerating effect of the Third Party Doctrine and took action to protect the 4th Amendment PRIOR to the leaks. This is not the type of legislation that $megacorp loves and supports. It's a pure civil rights issue. However, I don't think his reforms don't go far enough because the only effect it would have is to exclude illegally obtained information at trial. Considering how the Feds engage in intelligence laundering, it is clear that a mere exclusion is insufficient -- there must be personal and agency penalties for a violation. To be fair to Paul, he didn't have this information when he wrote the legislation, but without personal consequences, it won't be that meaningful.
A decent example of such penalties is contained in the WA State statute regarding hidden mic recordings of conversations: See paragraphs 10 & 11: Violating the process for authorizing and recording a conversation surreptitiously, subjects the officers involved to personal prosecution for a class C felony and the agency to substantial fines ($25,000 per occurrence). The Feds need to have a little fear put into their hearts -- they need to ask themselves "If I can't do the time or pay the fine, do I really want to commit this crime?" And make no bones about it, the Federal government, due to its rampant lawlessness (e.g. collateral construction/intelligence laundering), is a criminal organization and needs to be treated as such.
Finally, back to the original point, Rand Paul might be a dick, but if you will step out of your partisan political mindset and consider the possibility that he just might have a good idea, we can get America back. Same goes for the tribal GOP -- both of you, Demoplicans and Republocrats alike, quit being so fricken tribal. The two parties are basically fungible anyway -- latch onto the very few good ideas and push them no matter who makes the proposal.