I've been on the board of several in the last 20 years. Phone records are automatically monitorable by the NSA's ubiquitous monitoring, though tying that back to an individual can be difficult. It still counts as monitoring even if it's unidentified. Medical records are a _nightmare_, especially for those needing opiates of any sort, anything that requires syringes such as insulin, and prescripton controlled psychoactive medications which may be hoarded or resold such as Ritalin and Adderall. And I've helped with repairing phone systems in several such institutions.
If you'd care to tighten the category to homeless who can't remember or refuse to provide their names and family contacts, and who have no critical medical requirements, then they are less monitored or monitorable. But it's part of the role of the staff and of social workers who work with the homeless to get contact information to get them in touch with family and with services who can help them, to help establish contacts with the parts of the "social network" that can help them. It can be a very difficult balancing act to protect the privacy of those who are fleeing a very real danger or simply fears, and to get them the resources they need. But if an institution is saying "there will be nothing other than a paper trace, your identity will forever be secret", it's much like the privacy of the HIPAA policies. It's usually nowhere near as secured, and _cannot_ be as secured, as promised.
> Amish who use cell phones, yeah, they might be monitored. Usually though the Amish keep a land line in the barn for needed business. Land lines are not monitored in bulk.
Bank transactions are monitored. So are landlines, in bulk, at the switching centers. The room 641A fiber optic taps at the AT&T offices were not targeted at cell phones, those were on one of the cores of the US telecommunications systems. It's unreasonable to assume that such taps no longer exist, and the Wikileaks documents are clear that telephone tapping is wholesale across the entire telecom system.
> Deaf people using TTY are a group with more than zero members. Here you just wave your hands and manufacture a new type of monitoring that is unlikely to exist, and certainly not known to you.
I'm not ignoring it: the remote end of TTY services for most companies or homes are no longer mechanical teleprinters, they are multi-function computers. TTY traffic is not encrypted on the telephone backbones or in the switching stations. Unless you've gone to the now extraordinary work to get a real POTS line all the way to the local switchin gcenter, It's already been digitized throughout most of its passage for ease of transmission at the switching centers, and it is _simpler_ to record the communications in bulk than it is for voice communicaitons. No interpretation is needed, it's already plain text.
> Staying in a shelter does not create an electronic footprint,
I'm afraid it does. Most try to collect names, and mail addresses for families to reach out to them for donations. Medical needs for the many ill homeless requires treatment and prescriptions. Today, even paper records wind up recorded electronically and I've some reason to suspect monitored wholesale, especially for immigration or crime issues. It's not as _large_ of an electronic footprint as normal working citizens, but it's not zero.
I suspect I've worked with the extremely poor, including the homeless, more recently than you. It's very difficult for them not to have _some_ monitorable footprint, whether medical or in struggling for some kind of handout. They do "slip through the cracks" of services that are supposed to help them, but that's much different than their not having a detectable or noticeable trace.
> You seem to have a lot of trouble finding the line between "zero" and "not zero." But it is actually narrow and clear.
I agree with you that it is usually quite clear. In this case, the difference between being "low electronic footprint" and "monitored as a matter of course" is a distinct matter. The threshold of "not being visible to bulk monitoring", is lowered by the desire to specifically monitor those people who are close to that line, they're often of more interest for political or criminal reason. Coupled with local government monitoring for local crime, which is available to NSA monitoring, and coupled with both peaceful and criminal political activity fostered among the very poor in every nation, and I suggest that threshold of invisibility or immunity to NSA bulk monitoring is much lower than you seem to think.
I'm afraid that the easy answer is "all of them". Avoiding the kind of ubiquitous monitoring done on the cores of our telecom, email, fiscal, manufacturing, sales, and medical systems by the NSA is very difficult.
People in prison could be much more interesting to monitor, because they've already committed crimes and have limited, often easily monitored contact with the outside world. Many are immigrants, legal or illegal, and have family or business contacts in their native countries. They're also an infamous source of cult members and recruits to dangerous religious or political movements.
The Amish use phones and email for business, and handle credit cards or bank cards for business. They apparently are the largest owner of puppy mills, and that _does_ require paperwork for shipping, phones, and email in the modern world. They don't use these technologies _casually_, so they have a much smaller electronic footprint than many US citizens, but they certainly have one.
Deaf people using TTY are a very small group, and the TTY on the remote end is often built into a computer application. The TTY signal going over the telephone has been digitized by the phone company at some location in almost *all* modern phone lines, both local and long distance: It's content is recorded by organizations like the NSA simply to avoid people using it as a secret communications channel.
A small number of the homeless can be close to living off the grid. But as soon as they're staying in a shelter, or arrested, they have an electronic footprint again.
Because burning even a few hundred bytes of memory with a more general parser would have been an unacceptable burden for single programs on hardware that had only a few megabytes of memory, total.
getopt is a critical function now used by nearly all C or C++ programs that handle command line arguments. The "quicker to code" version you may write to get or care about the few arguments you use in a particular function may, indeed, work well on your limited environment. Unless you're quite good and quite thorough, they are unlikely to perform well on multiple architectures or to be really small and fast for hardware from the 1980's. If you look at the code at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., it is quite good. This is how we were expected to write 35 years ago. It has extremely well defined behavior and uses loops rather than the modern fondness for recursion, because calling subroutines was considered _expensive_ due to the context switching needed for all subroutines.
At that time, I was already working with BSD 4.x releases of UNIX. I'd begun to get fond of being able to see and compile my own versions of critical software.
"Huge amount" is not enough to be an enforceable copyright violation. There is a huge amount of GPL code. A "huge amount" could be copied under "fair use", while still being a tiny fraction of GPL code.
This is not to say there has _not_ been a significant percentage of code copied directly and used in clear violation of the copyrights. TIVO was an agregious example of such abuse, FANTEC was caught, and BUSYBOX was the first lawsuit about GPL violations. I've encountered violations professionally of violations of GPL, Apache licenses, and BSD licenses on an ongoing basis; The GPL violations are the most clear, due to unambiguous nature of the license.
I'm afraid that someone incarcerated and with powerful agencies annoyed with them can face far more than the infamous $5 wrench form of encryption cracking. These include legal and illegal threats to family, solitary confinement, lack of access to critical medical needs. They can also include more clearly illegal but available abuse such as rape, physical beatings, and starvation.
And child porn, and human trafficking. I'm personally less concerned ethically about illegal drug use. But assassination as you mentioned, and child porn and human trafficking as I mentioned, cannot be considered "victimless crimes".
Canada is not as densely populated, nor as energy hungry per capita, as the USA. The result is that the pollution from careless coal use is more of an issue here, and needs considerable regulation to prevent much higher casualty rates.
> Coal is still a profitable industry, as long as regulations don't drive the cost through the roof.
It was profitable to the mine owners. To the health of the public, and to the health of the workers, the cost was very high. We're seeing the effects of poor environmental and miner safety regulation in China, just as we used to see it in the USA. And because coal is a limited fossil fuel, slowing its consumption is actually preserving its availability for the next few generations. While US coal reserves are quite large, the amount of safely, easily minable coal is not: this is a critical factor in the increasing cost of coal.
Not consistently or well. Many of the integrated peripherals change chipsets frequently with no, or very minor, changes in the product number. This is like many laptop and pad vendors, consistency of hardware is not considered as critical to laptops as it is for servers. It's possible to run a Linux virtual machine on Surfaces and avoid the driver confusion.
> For the record both Mozilla and Google have been pushing ahead with stronger sanctions against certificate authorities
While this is helpful for general security, I don't think it's that helpful against targeted snooping. I'd expect Wikipedia's certificates to be stolen from inside their security environment: they're large enough and a source of enough useful trackable information that I'd expect them to be targeted, successfully, by security agencies around the world. Moreover, I would expect agencies like the NSA have access to the certificate signing certificates by targeting the signature authorities themselves, and to have access to the systems at worldwide SSL proxy systems like AWS and other commercial load balancers.
Where I'd expect HTTPS to be most helpful for privacy advocates is by raising the _cost_ of intercepting the traffic. Bulk monitoring of unencrypted traffic is much cheaper, and faster, than inserting a man-in-the-middle agent to decrypt and re-encrypt the traffic going to an endpoint, and requires much less sophisticated tools to avoid confusing the receiving website about where the traffic is connected from.
Basing the lawsuit on fraud and/or entrapment, with excessive damages, against defendants who lack resources to defend themselves in court, can be considered ethically extortionate even if the act itself cannot be successfully prosecuted as the crime of extortion.
If self-serving tweets with no evidence whatsoever were proof, then all of Donald Trump's tweets would be true. The archive is at http://www.trumptwitterarchive...
Even if the data is critical for this case, it can then be used for other government investigations such as those for tax evasion, H1B abuse, and potentially for civic lawsuits by current and former Google staff for abusive hiring practices. I'm not insisting that there is evidence of such abuses, but rather that the data would then be available for other investigations by other governmental or even private agencies who can subpoena the records.
You've my professional sympathy. Troubleshooting or migrating old tools written by someone who did not believe in documentation, who believed in source code as documentation, is one of the sources of my income. Forcing them to actually review the code with me and acknowledge that their code does not, and never did, do what they thought it did is something that has to be handled gracefully or they will engage in political backstabbing and otherwise poisoning the rest of the work.
> A good cashier adds value to the company by upselling at the time of purchase
A bad cashier does so badly, and ruins the whole sale. I've recently had this happen several times in the last year. A sales clerk tried to force me to take a store credit card, and another described a "sale" that involved buying more goods at a discount, thus insisting that I would "save money" by buying extra goods at a discount. That is not saving any money on the original purchase, it's buying goods I don't need and _spending_ extra money.
There are also Diane Duane's thoughtful and true to the original series 10 novels. These included "Spock's World" and "My Enemy, My Ally" that gave historical and thoughtful structure to Vulcans, to Romulans, and to their relationship.
Roddenberry was a working director in a tough broadcast market. From his own cast's testimony, he was a wonderful, sweet man to work with who had visions of what people could be and should be, and showed them living up to those goals in the face of tremendous pressures to please or avoid displeasing the sponsors who advertised on Star Trek episodes and on other shows by the same network.
> First, there's a big difference between a black woman with authority accepted by white men in the 60s,
This was the *early* 1960's, at the height of the civil rights movement. A black woman with authority for whom her racial identity was cultural, rather than a source of plot tension on a mixed staff, was a very large issue. The kiss between Captian Kirk and Leutenant Urura was a _very_ significatnt event, the first inter-racial kiss in television history. Nichelle Nichols part in Star Trek was a huge inspiration to black women and girls of all races. And Gene Roddenberry deserves all the credit he earned for his very positive stories that helped make Nichelle, and Uhura, heroes.
Most biometric scanners have poor resolution and are easily defeated with very modest resources. MythBusters did a very good episode about the ease of replicating fingerprints, and found recent scanners that could be defeated by copying a fingerprint on a laser printer and simply moistening the printout. There was also an infamous paper, available at https://cryptome.org/gummy.htm, describing more sophisticated approaches with the image transferred to gelatiin. That has never been refuted since its original publication. American police, and many security groups worldwide, collect large libraries of fingerprints that can be copied wholesale for just such intrusion.
Fingerprint scanners, which are the most common biometric device, remain quite vulnerable to targeted breakin. Fingerprints may be a handy access option, but they can't be considered robust security.
> You are correct, but they sure are using dogs trained by humans. You have to learn to delegate.
Often, they are using dogs "trained by humans" much like horses have been trained to do math in the infamous case of "Clever Hans". There are many court cases about spurious canine search results, and a great deal of video and legal testimony that the dog alerts are manipulated by the officers handling the dogs. See https://nevergetbusted.com/201... for more details.
Examples of highly trained noses include skilled chefs and skilled produce inspectors, who can often detect not only the nature of the ingredients they smell but the quality of those ingredients.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been on the board of several in the last 20 years. Phone records are automatically monitorable by the NSA's ubiquitous monitoring, though tying that back to an individual can be difficult. It still counts as monitoring even if it's unidentified. Medical records are a _nightmare_, especially for those needing opiates of any sort, anything that requires syringes such as insulin, and prescripton controlled psychoactive medications which may be hoarded or resold such as Ritalin and Adderall. And I've helped with repairing phone systems in several such institutions.
If you'd care to tighten the category to homeless who can't remember or refuse to provide their names and family contacts, and who have no critical medical requirements, then they are less monitored or monitorable. But it's part of the role of the staff and of social workers who work with the homeless to get contact information to get them in touch with family and with services who can help them, to help establish contacts with the parts of the "social network" that can help them. It can be a very difficult balancing act to protect the privacy of those who are fleeing a very real danger or simply fears, and to get them the resources they need. But if an institution is saying "there will be nothing other than a paper trace, your identity will forever be secret", it's much like the privacy of the HIPAA policies. It's usually nowhere near as secured, and _cannot_ be as secured, as promised.
> Amish who use cell phones, yeah, they might be monitored. Usually though the Amish keep a land line in the barn for needed business. Land lines are not monitored in bulk.
Bank transactions are monitored. So are landlines, in bulk, at the switching centers. The room 641A fiber optic taps at the AT&T offices were not targeted at cell phones, those were on one of the cores of the US telecommunications systems. It's unreasonable to assume that such taps no longer exist, and the Wikileaks documents are clear that telephone tapping is wholesale across the entire telecom system.
> Deaf people using TTY are a group with more than zero members. Here you just wave your hands and manufacture a new type of monitoring that is unlikely to exist, and certainly not known to you.
I'm not ignoring it: the remote end of TTY services for most companies or homes are no longer mechanical teleprinters, they are multi-function computers. TTY traffic is not encrypted on the telephone backbones or in the switching stations. Unless you've gone to the now extraordinary work to get a real POTS line all the way to the local switchin gcenter, It's already been digitized throughout most of its passage for ease of transmission at the switching centers, and it is _simpler_ to record the communications in bulk than it is for voice communicaitons. No interpretation is needed, it's already plain text.
> Staying in a shelter does not create an electronic footprint,
I'm afraid it does. Most try to collect names, and mail addresses for families to reach out to them for donations. Medical needs for the many ill homeless requires treatment and prescriptions. Today, even paper records wind up recorded electronically and I've some reason to suspect monitored wholesale, especially for immigration or crime issues. It's not as _large_ of an electronic footprint as normal working citizens, but it's not zero.
I suspect I've worked with the extremely poor, including the homeless, more recently than you. It's very difficult for them not to have _some_ monitorable footprint, whether medical or in struggling for some kind of handout. They do "slip through the cracks" of services that are supposed to help them, but that's much different than their not having a detectable or noticeable trace.
> You seem to have a lot of trouble finding the line between "zero" and "not zero." But it is actually narrow and clear.
I agree with you that it is usually quite clear. In this case, the difference between being "low electronic footprint" and "monitored as a matter of course" is a distinct matter. The threshold of "not being visible to bulk monitoring", is lowered by the desire to specifically monitor those people who are close to that line, they're often of more interest for political or criminal reason. Coupled with local government monitoring for local crime, which is available to NSA monitoring, and coupled with both peaceful and criminal political activity fostered among the very poor in every nation, and I suggest that threshold of invisibility or immunity to NSA bulk monitoring is much lower than you seem to think.
I'm afraid that the easy answer is "all of them". Avoiding the kind of ubiquitous monitoring done on the cores of our telecom, email, fiscal, manufacturing, sales, and medical systems by the NSA is very difficult.
People in prison could be much more interesting to monitor, because they've already committed crimes and have limited, often easily monitored contact with the outside world. Many are immigrants, legal or illegal, and have family or business contacts in their native countries. They're also an infamous source of cult members and recruits to dangerous religious or political movements.
The Amish use phones and email for business, and handle credit cards or bank cards for business. They apparently are the largest owner of puppy mills, and that _does_ require paperwork for shipping, phones, and email in the modern world. They don't use these technologies _casually_, so they have a much smaller electronic footprint than many US citizens, but they certainly have one.
Deaf people using TTY are a very small group, and the TTY on the remote end is often built into a computer application. The TTY signal going over the telephone has been digitized by the phone company at some location in almost *all* modern phone lines, both local and long distance: It's content is recorded by organizations like the NSA simply to avoid people using it as a secret communications channel.
A small number of the homeless can be close to living off the grid. But as soon as they're staying in a shelter, or arrested, they have an electronic footprint again.
Because burning even a few hundred bytes of memory with a more general parser would have been an unacceptable burden for single programs on hardware that had only a few megabytes of memory, total.
getopt is a critical function now used by nearly all C or C++ programs that handle command line arguments. The "quicker to code" version you may write to get or care about the few arguments you use in a particular function may, indeed, work well on your limited environment. Unless you're quite good and quite thorough, they are unlikely to perform well on multiple architectures or to be really small and fast for hardware from the 1980's. If you look at the code at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., it is quite good. This is how we were expected to write 35 years ago. It has extremely well defined behavior and uses loops rather than the modern fondness for recursion, because calling subroutines was considered _expensive_ due to the context switching needed for all subroutines.
At that time, I was already working with BSD 4.x releases of UNIX. I'd begun to get fond of being able to see and compile my own versions of critical software.
"Huge amount" is not enough to be an enforceable copyright violation. There is a huge amount of GPL code. A "huge amount" could be copied under "fair use", while still being a tiny fraction of GPL code.
This is not to say there has _not_ been a significant percentage of code copied directly and used in clear violation of the copyrights. TIVO was an agregious example of such abuse, FANTEC was caught, and BUSYBOX was the first lawsuit about GPL violations. I've encountered violations professionally of violations of GPL, Apache licenses, and BSD licenses on an ongoing basis; The GPL violations are the most clear, due to unambiguous nature of the license.
Except for $5 dollar wrench security hole. https://xkcd.com/538/
I'm afraid that someone incarcerated and with powerful agencies annoyed with them can face far more than the infamous $5 wrench form of encryption cracking. These include legal and illegal threats to family, solitary confinement, lack of access to critical medical needs. They can also include more clearly illegal but available abuse such as rape, physical beatings, and starvation.
And child porn, and human trafficking. I'm personally less concerned ethically about illegal drug use. But assassination as you mentioned, and child porn and human trafficking as I mentioned, cannot be considered "victimless crimes".
Canada is not as densely populated, nor as energy hungry per capita, as the USA. The result is that the pollution from careless coal use is more of an issue here, and needs considerable regulation to prevent much higher casualty rates.
> Coal is still a profitable industry, as long as regulations don't drive the cost through the roof.
It was profitable to the mine owners. To the health of the public, and to the health of the workers, the cost was very high. We're seeing the effects of poor environmental and miner safety regulation in China, just as we used to see it in the USA. And because coal is a limited fossil fuel, slowing its consumption is actually preserving its availability for the next few generations. While US coal reserves are quite large, the amount of safely, easily minable coal is not: this is a critical factor in the increasing cost of coal.
Not consistently or well. Many of the integrated peripherals change chipsets frequently with no, or very minor, changes in the product number. This is like many laptop and pad vendors, consistency of hardware is not considered as critical to laptops as it is for servers. It's possible to run a Linux virtual machine on Surfaces and avoid the driver confusion.
> For the record both Mozilla and Google have been pushing ahead with stronger sanctions against certificate authorities
While this is helpful for general security, I don't think it's that helpful against targeted snooping. I'd expect Wikipedia's certificates to be stolen from inside their security environment: they're large enough and a source of enough useful trackable information that I'd expect them to be targeted, successfully, by security agencies around the world. Moreover, I would expect agencies like the NSA have access to the certificate signing certificates by targeting the signature authorities themselves, and to have access to the systems at worldwide SSL proxy systems like AWS and other commercial load balancers.
Where I'd expect HTTPS to be most helpful for privacy advocates is by raising the _cost_ of intercepting the traffic. Bulk monitoring of unencrypted traffic is much cheaper, and faster, than inserting a man-in-the-middle agent to decrypt and re-encrypt the traffic going to an endpoint, and requires much less sophisticated tools to avoid confusing the receiving website about where the traffic is connected from.
Basing the lawsuit on fraud and/or entrapment, with excessive damages, against defendants who lack resources to defend themselves in court, can be considered ethically extortionate even if the act itself cannot be successfully prosecuted as the crime of extortion.
> Do no harm! That's their motto!
It was actually "Don't be evil". There's an important moral and social distinction.
If self-serving tweets with no evidence whatsoever were proof, then all of Donald Trump's tweets would be true. The archive is at http://www.trumptwitterarchive...
Even if the data is critical for this case, it can then be used for other government investigations such as those for tax evasion, H1B abuse, and potentially for civic lawsuits by current and former Google staff for abusive hiring practices. I'm not insisting that there is evidence of such abuses, but rather that the data would then be available for other investigations by other governmental or even private agencies who can subpoena the records.
You've my professional sympathy. Troubleshooting or migrating old tools written by someone who did not believe in documentation, who believed in source code as documentation, is one of the sources of my income. Forcing them to actually review the code with me and acknowledge that their code does not, and never did, do what they thought it did is something that has to be handled gracefully or they will engage in political backstabbing and otherwise poisoning the rest of the work.
And that will not wind up warming up the vault when in operation?
> A good cashier adds value to the company by upselling at the time of purchase
A bad cashier does so badly, and ruins the whole sale. I've recently had this happen several times in the last year. A sales clerk tried to force me to take a store credit card, and another described a "sale" that involved buying more goods at a discount, thus insisting that I would "save money" by buying extra goods at a discount. That is not saving any money on the original purchase, it's buying goods I don't need and _spending_ extra money.
There are also Diane Duane's thoughtful and true to the original series 10 novels. These included "Spock's World" and "My Enemy, My Ally" that gave historical and thoughtful structure to Vulcans, to Romulans, and to their relationship.
Especially if you consider his wife, Majel Barrett. I find it difficult to picture that amazing woman tolerating a husband who behaved so poorly.
> Second, Rodenberry was a cynical guy.
Roddenberry was a working director in a tough broadcast market. From his own cast's testimony, he was a wonderful, sweet man to work with who had visions of what people could be and should be, and showed them living up to those goals in the face of tremendous pressures to please or avoid displeasing the sponsors who advertised on Star Trek episodes and on other shows by the same network.
> First, there's a big difference between a black woman with authority accepted by white men in the 60s,
This was the *early* 1960's, at the height of the civil rights movement. A black woman with authority for whom her racial identity was cultural, rather than a source of plot tension on a mixed staff, was a very large issue. The kiss between Captian Kirk and Leutenant Urura was a _very_ significatnt event, the first inter-racial kiss in television history. Nichelle Nichols part in Star Trek was a huge inspiration to black women and girls of all races. And Gene Roddenberry deserves all the credit he earned for his very positive stories that helped make Nichelle, and Uhura, heroes.
Most biometric scanners have poor resolution and are easily defeated with very modest resources. MythBusters did a very good episode about the ease of replicating fingerprints, and found recent scanners that could be defeated by copying a fingerprint on a laser printer and simply moistening the printout. There was also an infamous paper, available at https://cryptome.org/gummy.htm, describing more sophisticated approaches with the image transferred to gelatiin. That has never been refuted since its original publication. American police, and many security groups worldwide, collect large libraries of fingerprints that can be copied wholesale for just such intrusion.
Fingerprint scanners, which are the most common biometric device, remain quite vulnerable to targeted breakin. Fingerprints may be a handy access option, but they can't be considered robust security.
There is testimony from various cannibals about this:
http://listverse.com/2015/07/0...
> You are correct, but they sure are using dogs trained by humans. You have to learn to delegate.
Often, they are using dogs "trained by humans" much like horses have been trained to do math in the infamous case of "Clever Hans". There are many court cases about spurious canine search results, and a great deal of video and legal testimony that the dog alerts are manipulated by the officers handling the dogs. See https://nevergetbusted.com/201... for more details.
Examples of highly trained noses include skilled chefs and skilled produce inspectors, who can often detect not only the nature of the ingredients they smell but the quality of those ingredients.