So now it represents a more interesting story on the flip side. How the current Australian government handles an Australian Federal Police commissioner who uses the public pulpit, his office, and terrorist fear mongering, to seek more power, have less accountability and to further limit the rights of citizens. It certainly looks Keelty is going to and is already getting the rough end of the stick.
When Google offered to do email services for ISP's to get those hold outs who refused to surrender their privacy, or when they started looking into providing medical records storage not for the patients but for the doctors, it really did demonstrate how little regard or concern they had for the privacy of individuals. Then of course you have the privacy invasiveness of the google anal-ytics script and google cookies.
Personally I would like to see the law revised so that companies would have to notify all individuals at least once per year about all private information they hold on the individual, who at the company perused that data, what was done with that data and how it was used, and what other organisation have had access to that data. At that time that should also allow the individual to make any corrections they deem appropriate to that data and beyond basic financial transaction history have the record completely expunged. In the case of minors they parents should be notified and be able to have that data erased (in the case of minors of course, there are no such thing as legally binding terms and conditions and that data should not be held in the first place).
It is completely and utterly wrong to say both sides a playing dirty. Everybody has equal and free access to the Open Document standard, including M$. When it comes to their proprietary format, only M$ has free access to it.
For any government to adopt it as a document standard is clearly corrupt as it is specifically and actively forcing every other company to waste money to achieve compatibility, as well as forcing every citizen who wants full access to exchange information to also pay an additional cost.
It is never corrupt when by far the majority are pursuing an equal and equitable goal and one company, in fact one company amongst millions of companies, is pursuing nothing but greed, control, and a means by which it can profit with each and every exchange of data on the face of the planet.
M$ has proven itself to be nothing but destructive when it has come to implementing any of the digital standards it has been involved in, it would be utter craziness to have a standard that M$ and only M$ has total and utter control of.
Google will be accepting bids from those countries that can show a long term commitment to the acceptability of the invasion of privacy of others and ensuring full legal protection for the use of that private data in any way that the googlite marketdroids choose ie. profits before privacy.
Those countries that show any signs of implementing strict laws to protect the privacy of their citizens as well a enforcing strict limits upon how personally, psychological targeted marketing will be, will consider themselves right out of the running.
I would personally hope that Australia is right out of the running and remains so, it would be embarrassing to be considered a suitable data warehouse for proctology inc.
The flip side of turning copyright infringement into a criminal act, is they have to prove you were guilty, not that an IP that your ISP automated systems was logged in as being from your account, was involved in an alleged copyright infringement.
They now have to prove that you were in fact in front of your computer, and that you were controlling the actions of your computer at the time that your computer was carrying actions that was infringing the copyright.
So that would mean a key logger was monitoring your actions on the computer while a video camera recorded you physical presence at the machine, either in configuring your computer to commit those actions at a latter time or in the concurrent act of committing those actions, all this combined with a recording of all data input and outputs between your computer and all network connections.
This is all required to establish a true a valid line of evidence to ensure guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, especially bearing in mind the severity of the penalties to be applied.
Of course in Australia every state and every polling station follows the same principle, if a citizen stuffs it up on one election, they can ensure the next time around they will not make the same mistake. State and federal elections are all run the same way, largely at the same polling stations, counted in the same manner, and ballots are largely similar.
No matter what happens practice generally will help to resolve any problems and most students are taught about voting, ballots etc. in primary school. Uniformity and keep it simple stupid, helps to create a clear, open and mostly honest system.
It is far more logical to make it illegal across the board to sell private information, without notifying the recipient of every sale of private information, including the name and details of the individual who sold the data, the name and details of the individual who bought the data and the company they represent, the full extent of the data traded, and what they intend to do with the data, and this should be done for each and every transaction, no exemptions.
They should also implement realistic data retention and correction laws, where companies that hold a private individuals data, notify the individual upon a yearly basis, with full details of the data held and how the data was obtained.
lets work to make privacy invasion just a bit more expensive to do than the profits they can generate by it.
Otherwise how long before companies like google start to offer money to ISP's for the records of all your internet traffic, and that is not unrealistic as they have already worked on handling all email traffic for ISP's so they could invade the privacy of everyone's email on the face of the planet, sending or receiving, they were going to get you one way or the other.
There should be no cultural bias against foreign products, that smacks of racism and is social unhealthy. All you need to do is recognise that free trade is only free when every body competes upon an equal basis.
When corporations so bias the government to allow laws that unfairly and corruptly create situations where competition is effectively eliminated and manufacturing or other services in other countries have a grossly unfair advantage, this done purely to inflate profits, it really is time to look at the law and review the application import tariffs.
Tariffs should not be considered as a means by which to protect inefficient industries but as a means by which to protect and promote, the environment, living and working conditions and consumer safety. There is absolutely no reason why tariffs should not be implemented to ensure a realistic minimum wage, ensure equal, reasonable and safe working conditions, to ensure the same environmental protection costs are applied globally and that absurd tax breaks are not exploited as a means of tax evasion.
True free trade would ensure that no country has an unfair advantage by virtually enslaving their workforce and turning their whole country into a toxic waste dump, they might as well adhere to reasonable standards, because failure to do so will be reflected in the market price of their goods anyhow.
What it 'smells' (sic) like, is more like a closet law to protect corporate polluters from concerned citizens. It would virtually insure that no corporation would come under investigation for air pollution as anybody who attempted to report them would come under immediate criminal investigation for owning an unlicensed potential terrorist device.
This sounds like some really sick Department of Homeland/Republican (in)Security idea to totally cripple what little is left of the EPA. Sneak the law in New York and then spread it to the rest of the country.
Naturally of course those with licensed detectors would only use them in corporate, profit friendly ways and ensure that those that supported the party did not have their profits terrorised while those that opposed the party were kept under permanent scrutiny.
Let's not pick on or exclude first or second world users. For open source software there is nor first, second or third world. Your contributions are purely valued on their own merits.
Of course open solutions created or contributed in the third world not only means they will be save money but they will also be able to achieve a more competitive status, in first and second world technology.
The important part of open source is to create an effective ecosystem for it, with it being taught in primary and secondary schools, being researched and contributed to in universities and the being applied and extended in business and government. This effort is then expanded beyond a countries borders and shared as a global effort, with benefits accruing to all computer users, regardless of race, colour, creed, age or especially wealth.
Closed source proprietary software, creates, and enforces the digital divide, leaving peoples as well as countries at a permanent disadvantage with what is becoming an integral part of any countries infrastructure and economy.
At the end of the day the current monopoly in operating systems and office suites, only suits once city, in one state, in one country, for every other person, in every other city, in every other state, in every other country it is a wasteful, pointless, dead end.
For $10,000 dollars and to be able to mock the lawyer even more, the blogger in question is most likely quite willing to sell them self out, although he/she better make sure he/she has a good attorney, because undoubtedly he/she will end up needing to sue them to get the money;).
It is quite easy. In M$'s case it is targeted at M$ applications in order to ensure they outperform competing productions. It makes other companies applications far worse as the application has to compete for ram that has been pre-allocated for junk like internet explorer, outlook, M$ messenger, and M$ Office, which is of course why Vista was using so much ram.
That way, they could ensure that Firefox, openoffice, thunderbird etc. underperformed on vista systems.
The big question is how are people feeling about having to upgrade their operating system every two years, their file server every two years, the work station licence every two years, exchange server every two years, their exchange client every two years and finally their three resource kits and manuals every two years. That is a pretty massive cost, including retraining, installation, updating, and lost productivity as a result of being, M$'s crash test, permanent beta release, dummy.
So will this be the new M$ trick, a crap version loaded with DRM and then a reasonable version (forcing upgrades for reliability and stability), then yet another DRMed, content restricted crap version (they wont give up, that monopoly on the distribution of content, just feeds into ballmer's greed and control delusions far to much for the billy goat to ever give up on).
When it comes to google don't confuse not wanting to give it away for free, with protecting your privacy. Google collects peoples private data to generate a profit. Just like any other companies that supply services and products to the government and charge for it, should not google sue to prevent the government from stealing what google sells.
Google cache, only via an ISP's proxy server, best not to put all your secrets in one spot, for some whacked out, arrest quota filling, promotion seeking, professionaly paranoid pencil dick's interpretation, that you are 'Guilty' of being a 'Terrorist'..........suspect.
Now that brings up the major stumbling block with multi tasking. Computers are demanding that everybody becomes a multitasker but the majority a simply incapable and fail.
It is always amusing when those that habitually fail at multitasking inevitably try to get their system admins to supply computers and software that will do their job for them, magic box solutions that systems salesmen are always selling, and that systems admins eventually give up on trying to explain that they just wont work, they just buy them, install them and watch them fail.
Of course you find most multitaskers in small and medium business, it is a requirement to be able to survive and thrive in that envinroment. In corporations whilst multitaskers are always wanted, they never survive as it doesn't leave enough time for important tasks like, covering their own but, taking credit for other people's work, blaming other people for their own mistakes and of course polishing the bosses butt, well, I suppose they are mutlitasking after all;).
The reality is that great multi tasking skills does enable you to do far more, the catch is it leads to, surprise, surprise, burnout. In fact a pretty well known condition in jobs that require a high degree of multitasking.
Computers have only accelerated the problem in some jobs, as they a great facilitators of even greater levels of multitasking, where you can do several different tasks at the same time.
Not necessarily by choice, but customer demands, supplier demands and fellow staff member demands all need to be fulfilled and earning a reputation for multitasking, just leads to ever greater demands being made upon you, until, burnout, you've made enough, and a single focused effort on doing nothing becomes appealing;).
So what you are saying is you should not complain unless you country is the very worst or perhaps to save the country any embarrassment corrupt politicians should not be pursued or investigated, or a military that makes a mockery of law and justice should be ignored. It would appear people are already shaking and more the just their heads, they are shaking their fists, placards and banners.
Any and all corruption in government, should be highlighted pointed out and ruthlessly pursued, and those politicians, corporate executive, and military officer should be charged with treason when citizens lives are lost.
All the propaganda in the world, does not restore the least bit of honour or integrity, once it is abandoned in the torture chamber, squandered in senseless violence upon children in some else's country upon and made a mockery off in a kangaroo court (oh sorry tribunal) where the verdict is known before the mock secret (their too embarrassed to even make it public) trial even starts.
You should never be embarrassed for pursuing corrupt governments, you should only be embarrassed if you do nothing or even worse, if you attempt to hide it or criticise those who refuse to turn a blind eye.
Modern infantry combat systems where the arms manufacturers have finally figure out a way, where the death of every military combat soldier will net them a substantial profit in the replacement of merchandise, the grunt on the ground has every reason to be truly afraid.
Obviously you don't believe in sustaining a highly profitable arms race as a way to suck up tax payer dollars and to line the pockets of the already filthy rich.
So radiation detectors, are they going to send out helicopters to meet incoming merchant ships, so teams with mobile detectors and diving equipment can check for nukes whilst those ships are at least still 30 kilometres out to sea, or don't they give a rats about coastal cities like New York etc. Or is it really just all bull shit in order to accelerate the arms race, along with preemptive nuclear strikes, as a way of guaranteeing an insane race to see which country can produce the first homicidal maniac politicians who would actually launch such a weapon.
As the Iraq war finally tapers off and American Iranian war looks to become a unachievable dream for the military industrialist running US foreign policy there seems to be a real push to restart the nuclear cold war regardless of the possible consequences.
Actually not true, in fact getting 'all corporationy' really means how far can you minimise service, support and the cost savings achieved do not exceed the number of customers lost, including the customary PR=B$ snow jobs, which attempt to convince the customer they are the only one with a problem and it was their fault anyhow and even so the corporation still cares about their problem and it will be completely resolved in two weeks, two more weeks, yet two more weeks, just two more weeks, honest just two more weeks, 'er', two weeks after a likely to be successful class action law suit is initiated.
All OLPC needs to do is ensure they are able to focus upon delivery or subcontract those services out to a logistics company that can achieve those goals at a reasonable price. The logistics route is often simpler as those companies can readily handle break down packaging from bulk to individual orders as well as final delivery to the recipient and if required keep the recipient advised if there are any delivery delays.
Well perhaps, maybe, just maybe, his first act should have been to repudiate 'Tiny Limp the Beast of Redmond' and make a stand with Linux and open source. Then perhaps we might, just maybe, believe in his change of stance rather than just his desire for a change of public image and they way people are writing his history. Unfortunately M$ and it's executive team have a rather damaging reputation for being the, 'er', 'um', 'Biggest Bullshitters' in the history of computer technology, which really makes it some what difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Free speech is free speech when it is a spoken 'opinion', however, free speech ain't free with it is the false statement of facts used to obtain money. That is generally considered as fraud and has some rather substantial costs associated with it, so not always free;).
Taking into account the often questionable morals of celebrities as well as the definitely questionable morals of the controllers of the cult, I dare say that more morally distasteful activities are going on with the younger more gullible, brain washed, 'slaves' to the cult of religious greed.
The secrecy likely relates to debauchery rather than leisure and that KSW luxury yacht that's wandering around likely has a lot to do with keeping their personal activities out of territorial waters and legal duristiction for as much of the time as possible.
It looks far more like they want to make cyber warfare legal, 'With new rules, however, nations could agree to waive sovereignty concerns and permit a direct response' and 'We need new rules of international law so military commanders can operate with greater certainty in cyberspace'.
So I read it to mean that pencil dick military commanders want to be able to hack and destroy other peoples computers in other countries if they disclose damaging information about the military, or the put of evidence of military abuses, or if the commit the heinous crime of all their published opinion differs the opinion put out by military propagandists.
For fuckity fuck fucking sake, talk about wildly out of control grab for power. What's next, a stealth cruise missile with an emp warhead will be considered am effective response because some computer geek in a foreign country is using Linux rather than windows and military counter intelligence (a truly appropriate title) can't hack into the computer.
The point to consider is that they can search you person discover the device, and whilst you remain under arrest hold that device and then seek a search warrant to access the data on the device or in the event that you are released and a search warrant is not gained for accessing the private data on the device immediately return the device to you.
As the device is controlled during your detention and you are no longer able to destroy evidence on the device or the digital data could hardly be called a weapon, there hardly seems any legal scope for accessing the private data on the device. Rather than allowing an individual to peruse your personal data for their own deviant gratification or allowing the confiscation of an expensive electronic device as a prima facie penalty for failing to show the proper grovelling respect (the cost of extended loss of use of the device, possibly years!?, hence the cost of replacement as well as the loss of access to the data and software contained within the device) and an ego based demonstration of power.
The whole idea of warrants is specifically an attempt to prevent abuses of power, harassment of individuals and the corrupt planting of evidence. In the case of digital 'evidence' the ability to plant false evidence is dangerously easy and virtually impossible to defend against, so there is no excuse not to ensure as much public oversight over that process as possible. Much the same for when you are questioned, that your lawyer be present perhaps the same should carry through to any electronic personal data storage device as it is very much a personal extension of an individuals own thoughts and private opinions.
You know I started looking, started compiling all the links and even found interesting bits of M$'s own site where the differentiate between discovery of a security vulnerability and disclosure (sic) of security vulnerability (really what kind of marketing B$ is that). Realised I was wasting my time and to be honest you want to find them look for them you bloody self they are easy enough to find.
What I did find truly hilarious in a twisted kind of logic way on the M$ web site, is the marketing yarn the Linux is more insecure than windows because the discovery of a security flaw coincides with the disclosure of a security flaw in Linux and as such windows is more secure because the discovery of a security is kept secret and not disclosed prior to the fix (apart from of course the bunch of flaws where the discoverers have refused to join M$ in it's marketing lie). http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/secnews/articles/itproviewpoint060904.mspx
Slashdot Mirror
So now it represents a more interesting story on the flip side. How the current Australian government handles an Australian Federal Police commissioner who uses the public pulpit, his office, and terrorist fear mongering, to seek more power, have less accountability and to further limit the rights of citizens. It certainly looks Keelty is going to and is already getting the rough end of the stick.
Personally I would like to see the law revised so that companies would have to notify all individuals at least once per year about all private information they hold on the individual, who at the company perused that data, what was done with that data and how it was used, and what other organisation have had access to that data. At that time that should also allow the individual to make any corrections they deem appropriate to that data and beyond basic financial transaction history have the record completely expunged. In the case of minors they parents should be notified and be able to have that data erased (in the case of minors of course, there are no such thing as legally binding terms and conditions and that data should not be held in the first place).
For any government to adopt it as a document standard is clearly corrupt as it is specifically and actively forcing every other company to waste money to achieve compatibility, as well as forcing every citizen who wants full access to exchange information to also pay an additional cost.
It is never corrupt when by far the majority are pursuing an equal and equitable goal and one company, in fact one company amongst millions of companies, is pursuing nothing but greed, control, and a means by which it can profit with each and every exchange of data on the face of the planet.
M$ has proven itself to be nothing but destructive when it has come to implementing any of the digital standards it has been involved in, it would be utter craziness to have a standard that M$ and only M$ has total and utter control of.
Those countries that show any signs of implementing strict laws to protect the privacy of their citizens as well a enforcing strict limits upon how personally, psychological targeted marketing will be, will consider themselves right out of the running.
I would personally hope that Australia is right out of the running and remains so, it would be embarrassing to be considered a suitable data warehouse for proctology inc.
You have got the /.ers all wrong, they don't wont it for free, they are quite willing to copy it all at their own expense ;p.
They now have to prove that you were in fact in front of your computer, and that you were controlling the actions of your computer at the time that your computer was carrying actions that was infringing the copyright.
So that would mean a key logger was monitoring your actions on the computer while a video camera recorded you physical presence at the machine, either in configuring your computer to commit those actions at a latter time or in the concurrent act of committing those actions, all this combined with a recording of all data input and outputs between your computer and all network connections.
This is all required to establish a true a valid line of evidence to ensure guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, especially bearing in mind the severity of the penalties to be applied.
No matter what happens practice generally will help to resolve any problems and most students are taught about voting, ballots etc. in primary school. Uniformity and keep it simple stupid, helps to create a clear, open and mostly honest system.
They should also implement realistic data retention and correction laws, where companies that hold a private individuals data, notify the individual upon a yearly basis, with full details of the data held and how the data was obtained.
lets work to make privacy invasion just a bit more expensive to do than the profits they can generate by it.
Otherwise how long before companies like google start to offer money to ISP's for the records of all your internet traffic, and that is not unrealistic as they have already worked on handling all email traffic for ISP's so they could invade the privacy of everyone's email on the face of the planet, sending or receiving, they were going to get you one way or the other.
When corporations so bias the government to allow laws that unfairly and corruptly create situations where competition is effectively eliminated and manufacturing or other services in other countries have a grossly unfair advantage, this done purely to inflate profits, it really is time to look at the law and review the application import tariffs.
Tariffs should not be considered as a means by which to protect inefficient industries but as a means by which to protect and promote, the environment, living and working conditions and consumer safety. There is absolutely no reason why tariffs should not be implemented to ensure a realistic minimum wage, ensure equal, reasonable and safe working conditions, to ensure the same environmental protection costs are applied globally and that absurd tax breaks are not exploited as a means of tax evasion.
True free trade would ensure that no country has an unfair advantage by virtually enslaving their workforce and turning their whole country into a toxic waste dump, they might as well adhere to reasonable standards, because failure to do so will be reflected in the market price of their goods anyhow.
This sounds like some really sick Department of Homeland/Republican (in)Security idea to totally cripple what little is left of the EPA. Sneak the law in New York and then spread it to the rest of the country.
Naturally of course those with licensed detectors would only use them in corporate, profit friendly ways and ensure that those that supported the party did not have their profits terrorised while those that opposed the party were kept under permanent scrutiny.
Of course open solutions created or contributed in the third world not only means they will be save money but they will also be able to achieve a more competitive status, in first and second world technology.
The important part of open source is to create an effective ecosystem for it, with it being taught in primary and secondary schools, being researched and contributed to in universities and the being applied and extended in business and government. This effort is then expanded beyond a countries borders and shared as a global effort, with benefits accruing to all computer users, regardless of race, colour, creed, age or especially wealth.
Closed source proprietary software, creates, and enforces the digital divide, leaving peoples as well as countries at a permanent disadvantage with what is becoming an integral part of any countries infrastructure and economy.
At the end of the day the current monopoly in operating systems and office suites, only suits once city, in one state, in one country, for every other person, in every other city, in every other state, in every other country it is a wasteful, pointless, dead end.
For $10,000 dollars and to be able to mock the lawyer even more, the blogger in question is most likely quite willing to sell them self out, although he/she better make sure he/she has a good attorney, because undoubtedly he/she will end up needing to sue them to get the money ;).
That way, they could ensure that Firefox, openoffice, thunderbird etc. underperformed on vista systems.
The big question is how are people feeling about having to upgrade their operating system every two years, their file server every two years, the work station licence every two years, exchange server every two years, their exchange client every two years and finally their three resource kits and manuals every two years. That is a pretty massive cost, including retraining, installation, updating, and lost productivity as a result of being, M$'s crash test, permanent beta release, dummy.
So will this be the new M$ trick, a crap version loaded with DRM and then a reasonable version (forcing upgrades for reliability and stability), then yet another DRMed, content restricted crap version (they wont give up, that monopoly on the distribution of content, just feeds into ballmer's greed and control delusions far to much for the billy goat to ever give up on).
Google cache, only via an ISP's proxy server, best not to put all your secrets in one spot, for some whacked out, arrest quota filling, promotion seeking, professionaly paranoid pencil dick's interpretation, that you are 'Guilty' of being a 'Terrorist'..........suspect.
It is always amusing when those that habitually fail at multitasking inevitably try to get their system admins to supply computers and software that will do their job for them, magic box solutions that systems salesmen are always selling, and that systems admins eventually give up on trying to explain that they just wont work, they just buy them, install them and watch them fail.
Of course you find most multitaskers in small and medium business, it is a requirement to be able to survive and thrive in that envinroment. In corporations whilst multitaskers are always wanted, they never survive as it doesn't leave enough time for important tasks like, covering their own but, taking credit for other people's work, blaming other people for their own mistakes and of course polishing the bosses butt, well, I suppose they are mutlitasking after all ;).
Computers have only accelerated the problem in some jobs, as they a great facilitators of even greater levels of multitasking, where you can do several different tasks at the same time.
Not necessarily by choice, but customer demands, supplier demands and fellow staff member demands all need to be fulfilled and earning a reputation for multitasking, just leads to ever greater demands being made upon you, until, burnout, you've made enough, and a single focused effort on doing nothing becomes appealing ;).
Any and all corruption in government, should be highlighted pointed out and ruthlessly pursued, and those politicians, corporate executive, and military officer should be charged with treason when citizens lives are lost.
All the propaganda in the world, does not restore the least bit of honour or integrity, once it is abandoned in the torture chamber, squandered in senseless violence upon children in some else's country upon and made a mockery off in a kangaroo court (oh sorry tribunal) where the verdict is known before the mock secret (their too embarrassed to even make it public) trial even starts.
You should never be embarrassed for pursuing corrupt governments, you should only be embarrassed if you do nothing or even worse, if you attempt to hide it or criticise those who refuse to turn a blind eye.
Modern infantry combat systems where the arms manufacturers have finally figure out a way, where the death of every military combat soldier will net them a substantial profit in the replacement of merchandise, the grunt on the ground has every reason to be truly afraid.
So radiation detectors, are they going to send out helicopters to meet incoming merchant ships, so teams with mobile detectors and diving equipment can check for nukes whilst those ships are at least still 30 kilometres out to sea, or don't they give a rats about coastal cities like New York etc. Or is it really just all bull shit in order to accelerate the arms race, along with preemptive nuclear strikes, as a way of guaranteeing an insane race to see which country can produce the first homicidal maniac politicians who would actually launch such a weapon.
As the Iraq war finally tapers off and American Iranian war looks to become a unachievable dream for the military industrialist running US foreign policy there seems to be a real push to restart the nuclear cold war regardless of the possible consequences.
All OLPC needs to do is ensure they are able to focus upon delivery or subcontract those services out to a logistics company that can achieve those goals at a reasonable price. The logistics route is often simpler as those companies can readily handle break down packaging from bulk to individual orders as well as final delivery to the recipient and if required keep the recipient advised if there are any delivery delays.
Well perhaps, maybe, just maybe, his first act should have been to repudiate 'Tiny Limp the Beast of Redmond' and make a stand with Linux and open source. Then perhaps we might, just maybe, believe in his change of stance rather than just his desire for a change of public image and they way people are writing his history. Unfortunately M$ and it's executive team have a rather damaging reputation for being the, 'er', 'um', 'Biggest Bullshitters' in the history of computer technology, which really makes it some what difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Free speech is free speech when it is a spoken 'opinion', however, free speech ain't free with it is the false statement of facts used to obtain money. That is generally considered as fraud and has some rather substantial costs associated with it, so not always free ;).
The secrecy likely relates to debauchery rather than leisure and that KSW luxury yacht that's wandering around likely has a lot to do with keeping their personal activities out of territorial waters and legal duristiction for as much of the time as possible.
So I read it to mean that pencil dick military commanders want to be able to hack and destroy other peoples computers in other countries if they disclose damaging information about the military, or the put of evidence of military abuses, or if the commit the heinous crime of all their published opinion differs the opinion put out by military propagandists.
For fuckity fuck fucking sake, talk about wildly out of control grab for power. What's next, a stealth cruise missile with an emp warhead will be considered am effective response because some computer geek in a foreign country is using Linux rather than windows and military counter intelligence (a truly appropriate title) can't hack into the computer.
As the device is controlled during your detention and you are no longer able to destroy evidence on the device or the digital data could hardly be called a weapon, there hardly seems any legal scope for accessing the private data on the device. Rather than allowing an individual to peruse your personal data for their own deviant gratification or allowing the confiscation of an expensive electronic device as a prima facie penalty for failing to show the proper grovelling respect (the cost of extended loss of use of the device, possibly years!?, hence the cost of replacement as well as the loss of access to the data and software contained within the device) and an ego based demonstration of power.
The whole idea of warrants is specifically an attempt to prevent abuses of power, harassment of individuals and the corrupt planting of evidence. In the case of digital 'evidence' the ability to plant false evidence is dangerously easy and virtually impossible to defend against, so there is no excuse not to ensure as much public oversight over that process as possible. Much the same for when you are questioned, that your lawyer be present perhaps the same should carry through to any electronic personal data storage device as it is very much a personal extension of an individuals own thoughts and private opinions.
What I did find truly hilarious in a twisted kind of logic way on the M$ web site, is the marketing yarn the Linux is more insecure than windows because the discovery of a security flaw coincides with the disclosure of a security flaw in Linux and as such windows is more secure because the discovery of a security is kept secret and not disclosed prior to the fix (apart from of course the bunch of flaws where the discoverers have refused to join M$ in it's marketing lie). http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/secnews/articles/itproviewpoint060904.mspx