Thank you for propagating the status quo and enabling mass surveillance on a scale never before imaginable. Your complacency in accepting violations of constitutional rights (for Americans) and human rights (for everyone else) is commendable.
As just one thing, vow that you will not vote for any candidate who does not support a full and complete pardon for Snowden. Even if you think your candidate is a "lesser evil" -- all that has gotten us is whole bunch of evil. Make the politicians fear for their jobs.
Send donations to charities that do good work in nations that will harbor Snowden. Yesterday I emailed public contact addresses at the embassies for Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Boliva requesting suggestions. I hope I get some, but if that doesn't work, there's always google.
It is important to talk about the issues and protest them, but it is even more important to take concrete steps in support of those issues.
Yeah, the Seattle restorethe4th rally was scheduled for July 6 at noon at Westlake Center/Park. It was about 80 degrees yesterday, and not a cloud in the sky.
I showed up after driving for an hour and half, walked around in circles looking for the protest. I saw three cop cars, three ambulances, a dozen cops, and a Jesus Freak with a sign asking "what does Jesus mean to you".
I didn't break out my sign -- I figured it would be bad PR to have a protest only as big as Jesus Freaks could muster, because that makes the issue easily dismissed, ignored, and made fun of.
Posting web pages and not doing anything... is not fucking doing anything. It is unbelievable to me that Anonymous can organize large protests against the CoS, a group that harms a tiny fraction of the world's population, but Seattle can't get 10 people to show up to protest an issue that threatens almost every person on the planet. That's fucking appalling.
Yeah -- I wonder this too. I've been thinking about redoing my home desktop with encrypted everything, thinking about going back to a very vanilla OS, wondering if it should be Linux or BSD --- and yet I still question if it even matters from a technical point of view. I have no idea what's really on my mobo.
As for phones, I would bet that is much more likely considering how there is so much less hardware diversity than there is with PCs, plus they're the perfect bugs with video and audio capability: no need for taking risks breaking into a house or business to install them or have them found -- hiding in plain sight.
Pathetic. Be complacent now and we'll all look like goatse in a few years time, begging for more. And idiots like this AC are gently guiding our hands to our ankles.
There is a huge danger in the "we already knew they did this" thinking you see posted everywhere.
We already had suspicions, and very well founded ones considering AT&T's NSA room, but the information we are getting is different. It has confirmed beyond any doubt those suspicions are true and those who believed them not foil hatters. Why is this important? Because if we do nothing in the face of absolute confirmation, it means that the DC pukes will know they have mandate to do all this and more.
So quit being complacent "I told you so" time wasters, and get down to working for change. This is quite seriously, a "now or never" moment.
Talk about limited attention span. The Seattle restorethe4th rally was scheduled for July 6 at Westlake Center in Seattle. You would think that in a city of a half-million people, a few of which are tech savvy, the protest would have drawn something.
Instead, there were three ambulances, three cop cars, a dozen cops, and one guy walking around with a sign saying "What does Jesus mean to you" or some crap like that.
What the hell? Anonymous could get a pretty big turnout to protest the Church of Scientology, an organization that harms a minuscule fraction of the world's most gullible people, but nobody in Seattle can turn out to protest programs that harm every fucking person in the planet?
We are a nation of laws, not men. If you don't agree with the actions of a governmental organization then you need to lobby your governmental representatives with your views.
So what you are saying, is that we are a nation of men. What else can you mean when the only way to get criminals out of office is to lobby them. Forget impeachment and that PMITA federal prison system they made into the biggest in the world, let's see if we can get them to quit committing crimes by buying them caviar and giving them really fat checks for their next campaign. Somehow -- I think that does not incentivize good behavior, but rather the opposite.
And what about those assholes in the revolving door plan -- contractor, to official, to contractor, to official -- like Clapper? Should we send them xmas cards in the hopes that he and his ilk won't commit perjury?
You do need a special license to run a day care service, and you should need a special license to drive people around unless you have a few million in the bank to pay for the damage you cause.
Lots of people work in the underground economy to avoid taxes, and while there is some short term gain to be had be outside the system, there are reasons why the system exists. Some of it bullshit, like wars and NSA and so forth, but some of it comes out of the labor movement and is designed to help and protect workers. Things like unemployment and workers comp. By working under the table, when something goes wrong, you are really screwed. And big business is always looking for ways to shift the costs of doing business onto the worker. This is probably one of those ways.
I don't know about every state, but one of the big games businesses try to play is telling people to become independent contractors. They think that if their workers are ICs, they won't have to pay workers comp premiums. Except the WA state statute doesn't talk about "employees" -- it talks about "workers where the essence of the contract is personal labor." So a while back, it was a popular way for taxi companies to shirk their responsibility by leasing cabs to drivers and making them independent contractors. Didn't work and they got spanked because the drivers provided only personal labor.
In the case of this company, where they act as dispatcher arranging payment, pick up, drop off and act as boss (they'll essentially fire you if you don't live up to their standards) -- that's personal labor. And while you may provide your own car, that isn't good enough to get beyond the "worker" definition (been tried). So anyway, if this company is operating in WA and not paying premiums, it's going to get fined, and if a worker gets hurt while driving, they'll be on the hook for all the claim costs.
That was my thought as well, but it turns out it isn't carpooling -- it's a paid service, and a fairly steep one at that.
http://www.lyft.me/drivers From the "become a driver" page: "Drivers are making up to $35/hr + choosing their own hours."
It sounds like a taxi service, except Lyft doesn't have employees, doesn't have to pay unemployment or workers comp insurance, and then if there is an accident, will the driver's private insurance which most likely assumes you are not being a public carrier, pay out?
It could be done. Enclose a dollar or two in an envelope containing the sealed letter with postage applied. This would allow an aggregator to pay for the postage of mailing the package on to another node. Hopefully, the receipt of payments would even out over all nodes so that it would fund the multiple remailings.
The big flaw though, is that nothing prevents the PO from just opening the aggregated mail packages and the individual letters.
So we need snail mail tor? mail aggregators receive mail then mail packages of s-mail to nodes who shuffle it with other packages, divide it up and then remail shuffled packages, till after several iterations, an exit node drops the individual letters into a mail box. Expensive though.
Crime rate per 100k people: 1968: 3,370.2 2011: 3,295.0
The peak was around from 1975 to 1996, ranging from about 5.2k to 5.8k per 100k population. It's been in the 3k range and steadily falling since 2004. But falling crime rates don't attract viewers.
How odd, just last night I was reading John Kiriakou's recent open letter in which he outlines how the Lieutenant prison boss tried to instigate a fight between him and another prisoner (*)? See page 4-5.
I told the CO that I could kill the guy with my thumb. He's about 5'4" and 125 pounds compared to my 6'1" and 250 pounds.
(*) The prison Lieutenant Told John that some Iraqi Kurd from Buffalo, who is basically in prison because he wouldn't testify against his parishioners, had been ordered to kill him. John later found out that the Lieut. told this same Kurd that John had been ordered to kill _him_. The idea being to get a fight going and lock them both up in solitary forever.
Until the casing, bullet, and primer can be made from non-metalic substances, getting the gun past detectors might be easy but getting the ammo in to make use of it substantially harder. Right now, they'd be better off 3d printing knives because an empty gun is just a way to get yourself killed.
Pictures are worth a thousand words... how many words on a page?
Still, pictures tell us stuff. That's why people old tapestries, drawings, etchings, etc. Sure, a 3d high def movie with substantial printed notation would be the best, but you work with what you have, even if it is just a picture.
Paper with print, and especially paper with pictures, is much more likely to be recognized as means of conveying information from a dead civilization than would corroded aluminum platters, discs of floppy plastic, spools of plastic ribbon, little rectangular plastic doohickeys attached to a corroded key chain, or little boxes full of various green cards covered with a spiderweb of corroded metal, even smaller black chips and maybe a few bulging capacitors here and there.
What is different, is that we have direct information (not statements, not conjecture, not foil hattery) about the surveillance. It is the difference between suspecting (or even having a well grounded belief), and KNOWING. It is the difference between knowing that AT&T set up splitters, and wondering what happens after that, and knowing what happens after that.
More to the point though, if we do nothing after these revelations, the DC pukes will take it as a mandate to do more and worse.
So instead of wasting your time and everyone else's lamenting how long it has taken to get to the point where real pushback can occur, get on board and start pushing the fuck back. Hard.
Demand prosecutions, impeachment proceedings. Start with the obvious, like Clapper's felonious perjury, and then keep plowing the bastards. Don't sit back and whine about people not acting in the past -- that is a useless waste of time and just plays into the enemy's hands. So stand up and fight, or if you won't do that, go back to your cotton row and shut the fuck up.
We are the US. We aren't the world and the world is not our responsibility.
But, remember how knowledge jobs were supposed to replace all those lost manufacturing jobs in the 70s 80s and 90s? Well what the fuck do people do if we begin exporting knowledge jobs too? What's left if you can't work with your hands or your brain?
And the race to the bottom ends with everywhere in the world having a real middle class
Wishful thinking. This not some pie in the sky Starfleet world. All you'll end up with is some people who made a dollar a day feeling prosperous because they're making $8/day while a few more billionaires get a little fatter.
Since the USA is the richest, mightiest, most powerful nation in the world, "legalities" are just a concept. There is a reason we are the only superpower on the planet. We can do whatever the fuck we want to you and you will take from us willingly.
This has to be a troll. But, considering our leaders... I'm not so sure.
Anyway, China will eventually stop buying our bonds. Then we're done. Google about Egypt, the Suez Canal, Great Britain, and how Eisenhower ended a war in Egypt before it really got rolling by telling the Brits he'd sell off the British bonds the US held which would devalue the pound.
And, Snowden started this off by saying he stole stuff, and then traveled to China. That's an automatic espionage charge right there, regardless of whether anything is true.
That's unmitigated bullshit.
What started this was the administration officials who committed perjury to direct questions about the scope of the program.
When we're in that circumstance, there is no other option but for a leaker to come forward and give us our ability to engage in the democratic process of electing leaders who respect the law, and chucking those who don't (hopefully into prison). There is no debate without a leaker when Obama and his cronies lie. There is no ability to meaningfully engage in the democratic process, when the voters are lied to.
Third party may be the answer, but I suspect they would be co-opted immediately upon their unlikely election.
I agree with you, though it might take a few election cycles. Even if true though, there is something to be said for vengeful voting if it gets the old lot of corrupt hacks to lose their jobs. Then you just have to keep on vengefully voting till they figure out that if they want job security, they have to consider themselves beholden to the public. Wishful thinking I'm sure, but I would really like to see some vengeful voting anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for propagating the status quo and enabling mass surveillance on a scale never before imaginable. Your complacency in accepting violations of constitutional rights (for Americans) and human rights (for everyone else) is commendable.
Sincerely,
James Clapper
which carrier?
As just one thing, vow that you will not vote for any candidate who does not support a full and complete pardon for Snowden. Even if you think your candidate is a "lesser evil" -- all that has gotten us is whole bunch of evil. Make the politicians fear for their jobs.
Send donations to charities that do good work in nations that will harbor Snowden. Yesterday I emailed public contact addresses at the embassies for Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Boliva requesting suggestions. I hope I get some, but if that doesn't work, there's always google.
It is important to talk about the issues and protest them, but it is even more important to take concrete steps in support of those issues.
Yeah, the Seattle restorethe4th rally was scheduled for July 6 at noon at Westlake Center/Park. It was about 80 degrees yesterday, and not a cloud in the sky.
I showed up after driving for an hour and half, walked around in circles looking for the protest. I saw three cop cars, three ambulances, a dozen cops, and a Jesus Freak with a sign asking "what does Jesus mean to you".
I didn't break out my sign -- I figured it would be bad PR to have a protest only as big as Jesus Freaks could muster, because that makes the issue easily dismissed, ignored, and made fun of.
Posting web pages and not doing anything ... is not fucking doing anything. It is unbelievable to me that Anonymous can organize large protests against the CoS, a group that harms a tiny fraction of the world's population, but Seattle can't get 10 people to show up to protest an issue that threatens almost every person on the planet. That's fucking appalling.
Yeah -- I wonder this too. I've been thinking about redoing my home desktop with encrypted everything, thinking about going back to a very vanilla OS, wondering if it should be Linux or BSD --- and yet I still question if it even matters from a technical point of view. I have no idea what's really on my mobo.
As for phones, I would bet that is much more likely considering how there is so much less hardware diversity than there is with PCs, plus they're the perfect bugs with video and audio capability: no need for taking risks breaking into a house or business to install them or have them found -- hiding in plain sight.
Yup, in the few minutes it took to type that, AC already got in one of those bullshit comments.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3945181&cid=44210277
Pathetic. Be complacent now and we'll all look like goatse in a few years time, begging for more. And idiots like this AC are gently guiding our hands to our ankles.
No more complacency!
There is a huge danger in the "we already knew they did this" thinking you see posted everywhere.
We already had suspicions, and very well founded ones considering AT&T's NSA room, but the information we are getting is different. It has confirmed beyond any doubt those suspicions are true and those who believed them not foil hatters. Why is this important? Because if we do nothing in the face of absolute confirmation, it means that the DC pukes will know they have mandate to do all this and more.
So quit being complacent "I told you so" time wasters, and get down to working for change. This is quite seriously, a "now or never" moment.
Talk about limited attention span. The Seattle restorethe4th rally was scheduled for July 6 at Westlake Center in Seattle. You would think that in a city of a half-million people, a few of which are tech savvy, the protest would have drawn something.
Instead, there were three ambulances, three cop cars, a dozen cops, and one guy walking around with a sign saying "What does Jesus mean to you" or some crap like that.
What the hell? Anonymous could get a pretty big turnout to protest the Church of Scientology, an organization that harms a minuscule fraction of the world's most gullible people, but nobody in Seattle can turn out to protest programs that harm every fucking person in the planet?
YOU SUCK SEATTLE.
So what you are saying, is that we are a nation of men. What else can you mean when the only way to get criminals out of office is to lobby them. Forget impeachment and that PMITA federal prison system they made into the biggest in the world, let's see if we can get them to quit committing crimes by buying them caviar and giving them really fat checks for their next campaign. Somehow -- I think that does not incentivize good behavior, but rather the opposite.
And what about those assholes in the revolving door plan -- contractor, to official, to contractor, to official -- like Clapper? Should we send them xmas cards in the hopes that he and his ilk won't commit perjury?
You do need a special license to run a day care service, and you should need a special license to drive people around unless you have a few million in the bank to pay for the damage you cause.
Lots of people work in the underground economy to avoid taxes, and while there is some short term gain to be had be outside the system, there are reasons why the system exists. Some of it bullshit, like wars and NSA and so forth, but some of it comes out of the labor movement and is designed to help and protect workers. Things like unemployment and workers comp. By working under the table, when something goes wrong, you are really screwed. And big business is always looking for ways to shift the costs of doing business onto the worker. This is probably one of those ways.
I don't know about every state, but one of the big games businesses try to play is telling people to become independent contractors. They think that if their workers are ICs, they won't have to pay workers comp premiums. Except the WA state statute doesn't talk about "employees" -- it talks about "workers where the essence of the contract is personal labor." So a while back, it was a popular way for taxi companies to shirk their responsibility by leasing cabs to drivers and making them independent contractors. Didn't work and they got spanked because the drivers provided only personal labor.
In the case of this company, where they act as dispatcher arranging payment, pick up, drop off and act as boss (they'll essentially fire you if you don't live up to their standards) -- that's personal labor. And while you may provide your own car, that isn't good enough to get beyond the "worker" definition (been tried). So anyway, if this company is operating in WA and not paying premiums, it's going to get fined, and if a worker gets hurt while driving, they'll be on the hook for all the claim costs.
That was my thought as well, but it turns out it isn't carpooling -- it's a paid service, and a fairly steep one at that.
http://www.lyft.me/drivers
From the "become a driver" page: "Drivers are making up to $35/hr + choosing their own hours."
It sounds like a taxi service, except Lyft doesn't have employees, doesn't have to pay unemployment or workers comp insurance, and then if there is an accident, will the driver's private insurance which most likely assumes you are not being a public carrier, pay out?
It could be done. Enclose a dollar or two in an envelope containing the sealed letter with postage applied. This would allow an aggregator to pay for the postage of mailing the package on to another node. Hopefully, the receipt of payments would even out over all nodes so that it would fund the multiple remailings.
The big flaw though, is that nothing prevents the PO from just opening the aggregated mail packages and the individual letters.
So we need snail mail tor? mail aggregators receive mail then mail packages of s-mail to nodes who shuffle it with other packages, divide it up and then remail shuffled packages, till after several iterations, an exit node drops the individual letters into a mail box. Expensive though.
You would think that watching the news, but look at the stats and you'd know you were wrong:
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Example:
Crime rate per 100k people:
1968: 3,370.2
2011: 3,295.0
The peak was around from 1975 to 1996, ranging from about 5.2k to 5.8k per 100k population. It's been in the 3k range and steadily falling since 2004. But falling crime rates don't attract viewers.
Other sources. Crime rate in the 00s. See PDF pages 3 & 4 (national rate steady decline): http://www.umassd.edu/media/umassdartmouth/seppce/centerforpolicyanalysis/crime.pdf
1991 -- 2010, FBI stats on Violent crime. 2010 level almost half of that in 1991: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls
How odd, just last night I was reading John Kiriakou's recent open letter in which he outlines how the Lieutenant prison boss tried to instigate a fight between him and another prisoner (*)? See page 4-5.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/705038/john-kiriakou-letter-from-loretto-1.pdf
(*) The prison Lieutenant Told John that some Iraqi Kurd from Buffalo, who is basically in prison because he wouldn't testify against his parishioners, had been ordered to kill him. John later found out that the Lieut. told this same Kurd that John had been ordered to kill _him_. The idea being to get a fight going and lock them both up in solitary forever.
Until the casing, bullet, and primer can be made from non-metalic substances, getting the gun past detectors might be easy but getting the ammo in to make use of it substantially harder. Right now, they'd be better off 3d printing knives because an empty gun is just a way to get yourself killed.
Pictures are worth a thousand words ... how many words on a page?
Still, pictures tell us stuff. That's why people old tapestries, drawings, etchings, etc. Sure, a 3d high def movie with substantial printed notation would be the best, but you work with what you have, even if it is just a picture.
Paper with print, and especially paper with pictures, is much more likely to be recognized as means of conveying information from a dead civilization than would corroded aluminum platters, discs of floppy plastic, spools of plastic ribbon, little rectangular plastic doohickeys attached to a corroded key chain, or little boxes full of various green cards covered with a spiderweb of corroded metal, even smaller black chips and maybe a few bulging capacitors here and there.
You should add a <sarcasm> tags.
There's a large portion of the American population who would mod you "insightful" thinking you actually believe what you wrote.
What is different, is that we have direct information (not statements, not conjecture, not foil hattery) about the surveillance. It is the difference between suspecting (or even having a well grounded belief), and KNOWING. It is the difference between knowing that AT&T set up splitters, and wondering what happens after that, and knowing what happens after that.
More to the point though, if we do nothing after these revelations, the DC pukes will take it as a mandate to do more and worse.
So instead of wasting your time and everyone else's lamenting how long it has taken to get to the point where real pushback can occur, get on board and start pushing the fuck back. Hard.
Demand prosecutions, impeachment proceedings. Start with the obvious, like Clapper's felonious perjury, and then keep plowing the bastards. Don't sit back and whine about people not acting in the past -- that is a useless waste of time and just plays into the enemy's hands. So stand up and fight, or if you won't do that, go back to your cotton row and shut the fuck up.
It's time to go beyond petty shit like that.
Patriotic Americans should descend on DC with pitchforks, tar and feathers, and enhanced voting techniques.
We are the US. We aren't the world and the world is not our responsibility.
But, remember how knowledge jobs were supposed to replace all those lost manufacturing jobs in the 70s 80s and 90s? Well what the fuck do people do if we begin exporting knowledge jobs too? What's left if you can't work with your hands or your brain?
Wishful thinking. This not some pie in the sky Starfleet world. All you'll end up with is some people who made a dollar a day feeling prosperous because they're making $8/day while a few more billionaires get a little fatter.
This has to be a troll. But, considering our leaders ... I'm not so sure.
Anyway, China will eventually stop buying our bonds. Then we're done. Google about Egypt, the Suez Canal, Great Britain, and how Eisenhower ended a war in Egypt before it really got rolling by telling the Brits he'd sell off the British bonds the US held which would devalue the pound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis#Financial_pressure
When you owe lots and lots of money, someone has you by the balls no matter how big you are.
That's unmitigated bullshit.
What started this was the administration officials who committed perjury to direct questions about the scope of the program.
When we're in that circumstance, there is no other option but for a leaker to come forward and give us our ability to engage in the democratic process of electing leaders who respect the law, and chucking those who don't (hopefully into prison). There is no debate without a leaker when Obama and his cronies lie. There is no ability to meaningfully engage in the democratic process, when the voters are lied to.
I agree with you, though it might take a few election cycles. Even if true though, there is something to be said for vengeful voting if it gets the old lot of corrupt hacks to lose their jobs. Then you just have to keep on vengefully voting till they figure out that if they want job security, they have to consider themselves beholden to the public. Wishful thinking I'm sure, but I would really like to see some vengeful voting anyway.