See, decadentcity.com and the related site were dedicated to message boards discussing "escorts"--like, the Heidi Fleiss type.
I kind of think this is a bad example. Regardless of what Mike Z's inflammatory video did, it ain't illegal. Regardless of what the FBI did, the escort business is illegal. The FBI should not be in the business of enforcing law only when the law is popular.
I was going to make it through the bible posts until I saw this :
And the Bible has been changing and changing for a very long time now. After taking a Classics course (god what a waste of time) you can see just how things like old texts change. The KJ bible is close, but noone can say that it is a truly perfect translation of the original texts.
The king james version of the bible was written at the behest and under the scrutiny of king james, a corrupt old ~16th century monarch. It was translated from the septuagint, IIRC, a latin translation of older (no originals remain) texts. While usable, it is far the inferior of most modern english translations in terms of accuracy. (NRSV is best for truth to actual translations, while NIV is pretty good for capturing the spirit of the original text, or so I've been told.)
Modern translations tend to be closer to the oldest and most reliable manuscripts than the KJV, the opposite of what you suggest. Unlike the KJV, newer translations are typically translated from the oldest and most accurate manuscipts, not from the last version of the bible some guy made 5 months ago. There are other reasons for increased accuracy -- there are simply more manuscripts, (the dead sea scrolls, for example) there is greater (free beer) access to them -- you just have the files on your computer -- and we don't believe that the (already once-translated) latin is for some reason more accurate than the older greek and hebrew.
Translations are more accurate because of other reasons, like we don't believe that women are evil or should be suppressed any more, and translators these days (www.wycliffe.org, although I don't see much meat on their site) tend to have hardcore computational linguistics tools that really weren't available 500 years ago.
I've seen lots of documentation out there -- there's a similar agency, dealing with software, called the SPA (software protection agency). SPA is not government (despite the "agency"), they are paid by bunches of software companies to protect those software companies' products.
SPA does do a raid-type thing. Their people barge right onto your site wielding government representatives of some government agency or another. They then wander around to all your computers and check for pirated stuff.
SPA depends on tips, usually from disgruntled employees. SPA fodder is probably always companies with a bunch of copies of illegal stuff. AFAIK they only chase down companies, because it wouldn't pay for them to take down individuals. Since they work for businesses, they are probably in it for the money instead of criminal prosecution, so normal people would be kind of judgement proof.
Nasty thing is that to prove your proper ownership of a piece of software you need three or four different things -- having only the original medium doesn't help. I think you need the original software, original packaging (conjecture) and some sort of proof-of-purchase (po or receipts or both -- I dunno exactly). Ugh
They should stop wasting time trying to bust the warez chans and try busting those rape/kiddy porn chans.
I would hardly think it's the duty of the BSA to break up rape/kiddie porn channels.
Furthermore, there are always going to be "worse" criminals to chase. Should the police enforce no traffic laws because they can't solve a couple burglaries?
To wiretap, the FBI (or other federal law enforcement) shows up an ISP's door with a warrant, signed by a federal judge, and says "hey, I want to wiretap so-and-so's internet communications."
This is equivalent to the FBI showing up at a u-stor-it with a warrant, signed by a federal judge, and says "hey, I want to check so-and-so's u-stor-it container."
Or, the feds showing up at your place with a warrant, because you are a bad*ss or they mistake you for being one. You are kind of obligated by law to honor a warrant, unless you want to get thrown in the can yourself.
That's why ISP's want wiretapping on routers:)
In addition, it is not impossible to believe that most people who don't read/. (and me, I'm the only one who reads/. and still trusts the government) actually believe that, God forbid, the FBI really spends most of its time tracking down dangerous criminals.
A couple companies (I'd say, maybe 5% of the work force) might want drug tests because they do government work.
Government doesn't like people with sensitive information doing drugs, because it turns out that (this way, not the reverse) people involved in espionage have a very high propensity, statistically, towards being involved in drugs.
If you're a normal company, I think it's stupid to have drug tests, unless somebody's really suspect and it affects their performance. However, for sensitive government work, people kind of get killed when people leak information. I'd rather have my privacy violated than have some poor underpaid 18-year old get shot.
The one bad thing is that you can't seek help from your employer or the government if you have a drug problem, because if you do you will lose your job too.:(
1. The ability to do wiretap is a law enforcement (hence mostly FBI) thing. If other intel (NSA, CIA) agencies do wiretap in the states, nobody knows about it. And somebody probably would if they did, seeing as how they have to ask phone companies, etc. for permission. If they don't ask permission, then we aren't talking about them at the moment, are we?
3. The NSA and CIA are rather closed, and nobody knows exactly what they do. The FBI, on the other hand, is a large federal law enforcement agency, and everything they do is just as open to the public as whatever your local police may do, i.e. whatever you do not know is to most likely to protect the privacy of the defendants and the integrity of case.
3. Citing Hoover-era FBI tactics as current FBI policy is absurd. It's like saying the army is inches away from running out of their bases and killing native americans. Sure, it happened, and it was terrible. But we live in a different era today. We don't have perfect law enforcement (never will), but we aren't illicitly wiretapping our president -- that's the Mossad's job now;)
3a. Citing anything ever done by the LAPD as general law enforcement practice by anybody but the LAPD is also absurd.:)BR
At the end of the article there is something said by an FBI agent about Internet Service Providers already being required by law to be able to provide wiretapping services.
I hate to tell you all of this, but this is not echelon. This is not a grand government plot. This is about the application of existing law-enforcement techniques (wiretapping phones) to new technology (wiretapping information transactions). The same procedures for getting a wiretap on a phone will be required for getting a wiretap on information transactions.
So, what, exactly, is the problem? Unless you are a criminal, and quite a significant one, you have nothing to fear from the FBI. If you did have something to fear from the FBI, your phone would be wiretapped already, your house will be bugged, and your actions monitored. And no, the FBI does not have the manpower to listen into your phone unless you are quite the bad*ss. Even then, a federal judge has to approve the warrant (the legal document, not the band) that will allow them to wiretap you.
While I feel there are some security issues introduced by this, I hardly think that it isn't worth the value given. I mean, on one hand, some incompetent sysadmin gets his system hacked (and it would have been anyway), or we can't get the information needed to convict dangerous criminals.
I hate to be this way, but I feel that some/.ers are law-enforcement luddites. On one hand, they believe technology is great, and we can use it in new and exciting ways. On the other hand, they believe law-enforcement shouldn't be allowed to expand their existing abilities to take new technologies into account.
I'm just rambling anyway -- really, if ISP's would really be required by law to provide wiretapping capabilities to the FBI, they'll have to figure out some way to do it, regardless of what the IETF says or does.
If it keeps people safe from going to war face to face and risking their lives im for cyberwarfare.
Cyberwarfare, at this moment, serves a similar purpose to electronic warfare, psycho-warfare, and heck, even air warfare.
They are side-issues that influence the main battle, i.e. getting what you want, typically liberating a stretch of physical real-estate. Students of the Yugoslav conflict know that our control of the air had very little to do with our tactical control of the ground. Yugoslav ground units were well hidden, and very few were destroyed. In support of ground forces the air force would have been much more deadly. But if your opponent only needs to hide to win, don't count on winning from the air.
It's very unlikely that cyber-warfare could so cripple an opponent that their military would withdraw. Look at the sanctions we put on Iraq and Bosnia. The effects were certainly worse than any the effects of any cyber-warfare we could have waged. Yet, neither backed down without a show of military force.
There's a saying from the cold war, that goes something like "It doesn't matter if you shoot every MiG out of the sky if you come back to base and find the Soviet lead tank commander drinking beer in the officer's club." Same thing with cyber-warfare. It's just another helpful tool that will not obviate the need for real actual combat.
There is an initiative to help blind people use linux called "blinux." Yes, there are plenty of blind geeks out there, and we shouldn't be afraid to stick up for them.
"The purpose of BLINUX is to improve usability of the LINUX operating system for the user who is blind" -- from their homepage
They've been around for a while now, and they're definitely worth checking out if you're developing nearly any applications. This is perhaps the first time I've ever been happy to hear about a lawsuit. (did you hear that AOL lawyer backpedaling?)
Nice thing about NSA : no "ops" section. I've looked at the job listings on their websites (you can't run ops without field agents). CIA : needs field agents. NSA : needs mathematicians and cs'ers
Fortunately, geeks aren't good at killing people.:)
Under US law anything broadcast on radiowaves (Except Cell phones) is free for anyone to listen to. If the NSA wants to listen in on Ham Radio or Air Trafic control or CB. They have just as much right to do so as You or I do. (They just have bigger toys to do it with).
Bounty hunters frequently violate the law in their apprehension of fugitives. They are just overlooked by law enforcement, however. On the other hand, if law enforcement broke laws in the apprehension of a fugitive, they would liable to lawsuits and whatever case against the fugitive could be thrown out.
I know that's kind of a stretch, I'm just trying to illustrate the point that just because we (american citizens) are allowed to do things doesn't mean that government agencies are allowed to do those same things. Look at http://www.nsa.gov:8080/about_nsa/miss ion.html. I think, technically (I make no claims about reality), the NSA isn't supposed to eavesdrop on americans, because there purpose is as kind of a foreign intelligence umbrella organization. Plus, I don't think they are (again, technically) allowed to eavesdrop on us. Fourth amendment and all.
The way around this is kind of cool -- but it still means that normal citizens don't get monitored.
The UK had a system where they would watch for voice patterns. While it is just becoming possible to do recognition on a random voice, it has been possible for many many years to do an analysis on a random voice pattern.
So, what the brits would do is listen for phone calls that had a certain voice pattern (terrorists or other criminals), then actually *tape* those conversations, and have a person listen to them and transcribe them by hand.
Yeah, that's why the NSA's mission is *not* to eavesdrop on american citizens (just check out their website). Argue with me about what they really do, but they are not supposed to listen to any part of citizen's communications (in international communications where an american citizen is involved, NSA is not supposed to listen to either side).
I have no idea where I saw it, but I read something somewhere where an FBI agent was saying the exact opposite : he could be in a chatroom, and somebody could say "I plan to blow up such and such public building" and None Of That would be admissable in a courtroom. Kind of makes you feel warm and cuddly, doesn't it?
Besides, the whole reason none of this scares me is that you have to either believe that (1)the NSA and CIA run around and execute americans at will, or (2)they generally ignore us, because only the FBI could actually prosecute us, and they have to use evidence they obtained legally or get the defendant acquitted.
Besides, if you were the NSA and could listen to *anybody's* communications, would you care about this message? Or what some sudanese army guy is saying to some terrorist? Think about it.
-someone says the government hacks their computer and gives no proof
--twice if it's the nsa.
-every time reading all of the comments makes you forget exactly what the DGP is
-someone says the DGP won't work
-someone points out hacking/cracking discrepency
-someone suggests the gov. should generically follow the same rules the populace does
-someone bashes M$
--twice if they suggest billy should be imprisoned or killed
-anyone blames criminal behavior on laws prohibiting it
-everytime the word "encryption" is mentioned
--Twice if all security problems could be solved by relaxation of encryption laws.
-someone mentions a historical injustice as proof on gov. inadequacy
--twice if it is more than 30 yrs old
---three times if it deals with hoover-era fbi
-someone claims the government has backdoors on current computers/encryption
-someone claims the DGP will give the government absolute power
-all-seeing DGP mentioned without mentioning corresponding all-using DGP
btw -- it's an old spy trick to spout out incorrect information with the hopes that the people who know will correct it. Don't count on hearing anything from the NSA except what they absolutely must tell congress;-)
Now, obviously, we all realize what a slugbot means.
First, it means a new linux port.
Secondly, it means thousands of linuxheads will anxiously be checking John Romero's.plan to find out when the new slugQ3test will be released.
Third, it means a new O'Reilly book. But what will be on the cover? A slug or a salt shaker?
Four: General Media will recognize value of slugbot, then say it is overhyped. Doc Martens launches a FUD campaign. Sadly, nobody seems to understand slugbot, except for readers of slashslug.org, and they inevitably come into conflict with readers of rival site slugdot.org.
Five: the subject for the first/. action movie:
They were ordinary slug-hunting robots. He was a mild-mannered garden hamster. But when they killed his partner, they made him mad. This Christmas, are you the slugbot? Or are you the slugbotbot? 'Hemos Thunder'."
Slashdot Mirror
"escorts"--like, the Heidi Fleiss type.
I kind of think this is a bad example. Regardless of what Mike Z's inflammatory video did, it ain't illegal. Regardless of what the FBI did, the escort business is illegal. The FBI should not be in the business of enforcing law only when the law is popular.
And the Bible has been changing and changing for a very long time now. After taking a Classics course (god what a waste of time) you can see just how things like old texts change. The KJ bible is close, but noone can say that it is a truly perfect translation of the original texts.
The king james version of the bible was written at the behest and under the scrutiny of king james, a corrupt old ~16th century monarch. It was translated from the septuagint, IIRC, a latin translation of older (no originals remain) texts. While usable, it is far the inferior of most modern english translations in terms of accuracy. (NRSV is best for truth to actual translations, while NIV is pretty good for capturing the spirit of the original text, or so I've been told.)
Modern translations tend to be closer to the oldest and most reliable manuscripts than the KJV, the opposite of what you suggest. Unlike the KJV, newer translations are typically translated from the oldest and most accurate manuscipts, not from the last version of the bible some guy made 5 months ago. There are other reasons for increased accuracy -- there are simply more manuscripts, (the dead sea scrolls, for example) there is greater (free beer) access to them -- you just have the files on your computer -- and we don't believe that the (already once-translated) latin is for some reason more accurate than the older greek and hebrew.
Translations are more accurate because of other reasons, like we don't believe that women are evil or should be suppressed any more, and translators these days (www.wycliffe.org, although I don't see much meat on their site) tend to have hardcore computational linguistics tools that really weren't available 500 years ago.
SPA does do a raid-type thing. Their people barge right onto your site wielding government representatives of some government agency or another. They then wander around to all your computers and check for pirated stuff.
SPA depends on tips, usually from disgruntled employees. SPA fodder is probably always companies with a bunch of copies of illegal stuff. AFAIK they only chase down companies, because it wouldn't pay for them to take down individuals. Since they work for businesses, they are probably in it for the money instead of criminal prosecution, so normal people would be kind of judgement proof.
Nasty thing is that to prove your proper ownership of a piece of software you need three or four different things -- having only the original medium doesn't help. I think you need the original software, original packaging (conjecture) and some sort of proof-of-purchase (po or receipts or both -- I dunno exactly). Ugh
I would hardly think it's the duty of the BSA to break up rape/kiddie porn channels.
Furthermore, there are always going to be "worse" criminals to chase. Should the police enforce no traffic laws because they can't solve a couple burglaries?
This is equivalent to the FBI showing up at a u-stor-it with a warrant, signed by a federal judge, and says "hey, I want to check so-and-so's u-stor-it container."
Or, the feds showing up at your place with a warrant, because you are a bad*ss or they mistake you for being one. You are kind of obligated by law to honor a warrant, unless you want to get thrown in the can yourself.
That's why ISP's want wiretapping on routers :)
In addition, it is not impossible to believe that most people who don't read /. (and me, I'm the only one who reads /. and still trusts the government) actually believe that, God forbid, the FBI really spends most of its time tracking down dangerous criminals.
Government doesn't like people with sensitive information doing drugs, because it turns out that (this way, not the reverse) people involved in espionage have a very high propensity, statistically, towards being involved in drugs.
If you're a normal company, I think it's stupid to have drug tests, unless somebody's really suspect and it affects their performance. However, for sensitive government work, people kind of get killed when people leak information. I'd rather have my privacy violated than have some poor underpaid 18-year old get shot.
The one bad thing is that you can't seek help from your employer or the government if you have a drug problem, because if you do you will lose your job too. :(
3. The NSA and CIA are rather closed, and nobody knows exactly what they do. The FBI, on the other hand, is a large federal law enforcement agency, and everything they do is just as open to the public as whatever your local police may do, i.e. whatever you do not know is to most likely to protect the privacy of the defendants and the integrity of case.
3. Citing Hoover-era FBI tactics as current FBI policy is absurd. It's like saying the army is inches away from running out of their bases and killing native americans. Sure, it happened, and it was terrible. But we live in a different era today. We don't have perfect law enforcement (never will), but we aren't illicitly wiretapping our president -- that's the Mossad's job now ;)
3a. Citing anything ever done by the LAPD as general law enforcement practice by anybody but the LAPD is also absurd. :)BR
I hate to tell you all of this, but this is not echelon. This is not a grand government plot. This is about the application of existing law-enforcement techniques (wiretapping phones) to new technology (wiretapping information transactions). The same procedures for getting a wiretap on a phone will be required for getting a wiretap on information transactions.
So, what, exactly, is the problem? Unless you are a criminal, and quite a significant one, you have nothing to fear from the FBI. If you did have something to fear from the FBI, your phone would be wiretapped already, your house will be bugged, and your actions monitored. And no, the FBI does not have the manpower to listen into your phone unless you are quite the bad*ss. Even then, a federal judge has to approve the warrant (the legal document, not the band) that will allow them to wiretap you.
While I feel there are some security issues introduced by this, I hardly think that it isn't worth the value given. I mean, on one hand, some incompetent sysadmin gets his system hacked (and it would have been anyway), or we can't get the information needed to convict dangerous criminals.
I hate to be this way, but I feel that some /.ers are law-enforcement luddites. On one hand, they believe technology is great, and we can use it in new and exciting ways. On the other hand, they believe law-enforcement shouldn't be allowed to expand their existing abilities to take new technologies into account.
I'm just rambling anyway -- really, if ISP's would really be required by law to provide wiretapping capabilities to the FBI, they'll have to figure out some way to do it, regardless of what the IETF says or does.
Cyberwarfare, at this moment, serves a similar purpose to electronic warfare, psycho-warfare, and heck, even air warfare.
They are side-issues that influence the main battle, i.e. getting what you want, typically liberating a stretch of physical real-estate. Students of the Yugoslav conflict know that our control of the air had very little to do with our tactical control of the ground. Yugoslav ground units were well hidden, and very few were destroyed. In support of ground forces the air force would have been much more deadly. But if your opponent only needs to hide to win, don't count on winning from the air.
It's very unlikely that cyber-warfare could so cripple an opponent that their military would withdraw. Look at the sanctions we put on Iraq and Bosnia. The effects were certainly worse than any the effects of any cyber-warfare we could have waged. Yet, neither backed down without a show of military force.
There's a saying from the cold war, that goes something like "It doesn't matter if you shoot every MiG out of the sky if you come back to base and find the Soviet lead tank commander drinking beer in the officer's club." Same thing with cyber-warfare. It's just another helpful tool that will not obviate the need for real actual combat.
http://leb.net/blinux/index.html
"The purpose of BLINUX
is to improve usability of the LINUX operating system
for the user who is blind" -- from their homepage
They've been around for a while now, and they're definitely worth checking out if you're developing nearly any applications. This is perhaps the first time I've ever been happy to hear about a lawsuit. (did you hear that AOL lawyer backpedaling?)
Fortunately, geeks aren't good at killing people. :)
Bounty hunters frequently violate the law in their apprehension of fugitives. They are just overlooked by law enforcement, however. On the other hand, if law enforcement broke laws in the apprehension of a fugitive, they would liable to lawsuits and whatever case against the fugitive could be thrown out.
I know that's kind of a stretch, I'm just trying to illustrate the point that just because we (american citizens) are allowed to do things doesn't mean that government agencies are allowed to do those same things. Look at http://www.nsa.gov:8080/about_nsa/miss ion.html. I think, technically (I make no claims about reality), the NSA isn't supposed to eavesdrop on americans, because there purpose is as kind of a foreign intelligence umbrella organization. Plus, I don't think they are (again, technically) allowed to eavesdrop on us. Fourth amendment and all.
The UK had a system where they would watch for voice patterns. While it is just becoming possible to do recognition on a random voice, it has been possible for many many years to do an analysis on a random voice pattern.
So, what the brits would do is listen for phone calls that had a certain voice pattern (terrorists or other criminals), then actually *tape* those conversations, and have a person listen to them and transcribe them by hand.
I just thought this was kind of a neat hack :)
I have no idea where I saw it, but I read something somewhere where an FBI agent was saying the exact opposite : he could be in a chatroom, and somebody could say "I plan to blow up such and such public building" and None Of That would be admissable in a courtroom. Kind of makes you feel warm and cuddly, doesn't it?
Besides, the whole reason none of this scares me is that you have to either believe that (1)the NSA and CIA run around and execute americans at will, or (2)they generally ignore us, because only the FBI could actually prosecute us, and they have to use evidence they obtained legally or get the defendant acquitted.
Besides, if you were the NSA and could listen to *anybody's* communications, would you care about this message? Or what some sudanese army guy is saying to some terrorist? Think about it.
Take a drink whenever :
-someone says the government hacks their computer and gives no proof
--twice if it's the nsa.
-every time reading all of the comments makes you forget exactly what the DGP is
-someone says the DGP won't work
-someone points out hacking/cracking discrepency
-someone suggests the gov. should generically follow the same rules the populace does
-someone bashes M$
--twice if they suggest billy should be imprisoned or killed
-anyone blames criminal behavior on laws prohibiting it
-everytime the word "encryption" is mentioned
--Twice if all security problems could be solved by relaxation of encryption laws.
-someone mentions a historical injustice as proof on gov. inadequacy
--twice if it is more than 30 yrs old
---three times if it deals with hoover-era fbi
-someone claims the government has backdoors on current computers/encryption
-someone claims the DGP will give the government absolute power
-all-seeing DGP mentioned without mentioning corresponding all-using DGP
btw -- it's an old spy trick to spout out incorrect information with the hopes that the people who know will correct it. Don't count on hearing anything from the NSA except what they absolutely must tell congress ;-)
First, it means a new linux port.
Secondly, it means thousands of linuxheads will anxiously be checking John Romero's .plan to find out when the new slugQ3test will be released.
Third, it means a new O'Reilly book. But what will be on the cover? A slug or a salt shaker?
Four: General Media will recognize value of slugbot, then say it is overhyped. Doc Martens launches a FUD campaign. Sadly, nobody seems to understand slugbot, except for readers of slashslug.org, and they inevitably come into conflict with readers of rival site slugdot.org.
Five: the subject for the first /. action movie:
They were ordinary slug-hunting robots. He was a mild-mannered garden hamster. But when they killed his partner, they made him mad. This Christmas, are you the slugbot? Or are you the slugbotbot? 'Hemos Thunder'."