All I'm saying is that if you, as a government, feel there is some compelling necessity to gather this kind of data, then you should be perfectly capable, BEFORE a whistle blower outs you, to lay out what you think you need to do and why you need to do it.
That might be the case if the data was hard to come by, but in this case, they even have a simple-to-use search engine. It's so pathetically easy to spy now that I don't think anyone is really feeling all that nervous about it.
No details of any of these alleged activities was provided. Considering the source has been caught lying to Congress, why would you give it any credibility at all. Besides the phrase "terrorist-related activities" is so vague and broad it could extend from someone trying to plant dirty bombs in Akron, Ohio to some slimy little Islamist sending a few bucks to the Muslim Brotherhood. With actual details, even if the number is correct, it is completely meaningless.
Yes, it's a real damned shame that everyone now knows that Skype is a porous platform that allows the United States government (and likely any other government that asks) to spy on you.
Fortunately, the next President of the United States, Rand Paul, will defund the National Weather Service, since it violates the true intent of the Cosntitution. That way the country will be depopulated of millions of black col.... err I mean welfare recipients and Latin.... er I mean illegal immigrants, and Anglo-Sax... er, I mean right and true taxpayers will be left to lick my love pu.... er celebrate their freedom!
I don't think anyone but the crazy wingnuts think that governments should be deprived of intelligence. The issue here isn't really that the NSA has these vast powers. After all, we've known this was likely long before 9-11, and historians have even pointed out that the Lincoln Administration had moved to gather information from all telegraph transmissions, so this has been around for a helluva lot longer than the Internet.
The issue is accountability. If you're going to do this level of data gathering, then the citizens have the right to know. Not only do they have the right to know it's going on, but they have the right to expect a reasonable level of accountability.
What has happened here is a vast program that was largely secret, where even Congress was fed marginal information, and which is overseen by a judicial entity (FISA court) that almost never says "No". There has been no accountability. The Executive has simply taken an insanely liberal reading of the Patriot Act and FISA and ran with it, and Congress hasn't even cared enough to bother asking any real questions until Edward Snowden had the balls to hand a British newspaper some internal documents detailing the level and capacity of surveillance.
The point is that the People elect representatives to Congress to, gosh, represent their interests, because, well, the People can't sit around all day every day parked out on Pennsylvania Avenue keeping an eye on the White House. Yes, Americans should be more proactive, but at the same time they should be able to put some faith in all those Representatives and Senators that they're not just there to play pointless political games.
Indeed. All that surveillance of millions of innocent Americans (and presumably that many innocent people throughout the rest of the world) sure did prevent the Boston Marathon attack.
When your surveillance program is not only immoral, but ineffective, then there's not a lot you can do to defend it.
Or hanging out in a Moscow airport waiting for the President to offer the appropriate bribe to Vladimir Putin to have your ass sent back to the United States for the crime of causing the Surveillance State a little trouble.
Sure they lied to Congress. But Congress had the ability to call these bastards in at any time over the last decade. If the Bush and Obama Administrations are guilty of being lying power-abusing peeping toms, then Congress has to accept the blame for being utterly fucking useless. What the fuck is the point of oversight committees that provide no fucking oversight whatsoever?
Everyone from the Founding Fathers onward expected the Executive to play fast and loose and to take as much power as it could at any given moment and push the margins with incredibly liberal, if not outright ludicrous interpretations of law. That has been the nature of the executive branch since the dawn of time. The whole point of Congress is to create a check on that power, to have lawmakers who not only can hold the Executive to account, but can even pass laws to constrain the Executive when it crosses the line.
So what the fuck has the Executive done about this? Even now, a slim majority are to craven and stupid to even moderately hold the Executive to check. Yes, they'll huff and puff and make rude noises, but if they're not outright complicit in what the NSA has been up to since 9-11, then they are as much to blame for not doing the job that the Constitution set out for them.
If not even the subhuman halfwits in Congress believe the claim of 54 plots being discovered, then I fail to see the bright people at Black Hat should be convinced.
And yet they still want to hang Snowden from the highest tree they can find.
What's really happened is that Congress, which has spent the last decade after the Patriot Act was passed jacking off and doing piss all to keep the Executive in check, is now suddenly been embarrassed by the revelations, and wants to look all huffy-and-puffy. But make no mistake, they want Snowden disemboweled just as much as the Administration, if for no other reason than having the audacity to interrupt that partisan circle jerk with some meaningful and critical to the national interest.
Indeed. The problem here isn't encryption, it's trusting commercial CAs that are more than likely providing governments with private keys so these governments can proceed with man-in-the-middle decryption. If you create your own CA and properly manage your private keys, then said governments are out in the cold.
If you generate and secure your own private keys and don't use commercial CAs, then what are they going to do? I suppose they could do what the Iranians and Chinese do, which is to use deep packet inspection to sort out that some or all of your traffic is encrypted, and then block it, but if we've reached that point where Western governments are erecting Great Firewalls, then we've reached a point where we're well and truly screwed anyways.
I've been hearing "the tablet bubble is about to burst" for three years now, and during that time I've seen the number of tablets out there grow and grow and grow. I remember going to a business conference two and a half years ago and there were a couple of iPads in the room and the rest were notebooks and netbooks. I went to a conference last fall and I saw a few notebooks and the rest were iPads and various Android tablets. I went to a small meeting a few months ago with twelve other people, only one had a notebook, about 2/3s had iPads and the rest looked to be either Galaxy Tabs or Nexus 7s.
I have a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse pad combo and when I use it with my Nexus 7, I get a mouse pointer and can use my RDP app for Windows sessions just like I would if I was on a notebook. Screen's a bit small, of course, but when I'm on the road and need to get into the office network post haste, nothing beats it.
I'd happily buy one if it were substantially cheaper and I could tear RT off of it and put Android on, but seeing as they are locked down with an operating system that nobody wants and no way to get it out, fuck 'em.
The news here is that even Microsoft has admitted, albeit indirectly, that RT is an utter failure. All that money and it's still Android and iOS as the market dominators, with Microsoft and Blackberry vying who gets sloppy thirds.
We need more articles filled with sciency words strung together to make word salads so ignoramuses can make money. The only thing I can give the writer of this article for is he didn't put the word "quantum" in any where.
"I'm sorry, Spluggies Brand Bread did not renew their agreement with your Anus 11 Brand Ultratoaster. This toaster does not authorize the toasting of Spluggies Bread."
"Your milk carton has been determined to come from Canada. The Sphincter X73 Megafridge will not permit you to insert it, as there is no cross-licensing agreement with Canada."
I can just see sites dedicated to rooting your shower so you can use European shampoo and conditioner.
Slashdot Mirror
All I'm saying is that if you, as a government, feel there is some compelling necessity to gather this kind of data, then you should be perfectly capable, BEFORE a whistle blower outs you, to lay out what you think you need to do and why you need to do it.
That might be the case if the data was hard to come by, but in this case, they even have a simple-to-use search engine. It's so pathetically easy to spy now that I don't think anyone is really feeling all that nervous about it.
No details of any of these alleged activities was provided. Considering the source has been caught lying to Congress, why would you give it any credibility at all. Besides the phrase "terrorist-related activities" is so vague and broad it could extend from someone trying to plant dirty bombs in Akron, Ohio to some slimy little Islamist sending a few bucks to the Muslim Brotherhood. With actual details, even if the number is correct, it is completely meaningless.
Yes, it's a real damned shame that everyone now knows that Skype is a porous platform that allows the United States government (and likely any other government that asks) to spy on you.
It's so restricted that the submitter couldn't.
Fortunately, the next President of the United States, Rand Paul, will defund the National Weather Service, since it violates the true intent of the Cosntitution. That way the country will be depopulated of millions of black col.... err I mean welfare recipients and Latin.... er I mean illegal immigrants, and Anglo-Sax... er, I mean right and true taxpayers will be left to lick my love pu.... er celebrate their freedom!
I don't think anyone but the crazy wingnuts think that governments should be deprived of intelligence. The issue here isn't really that the NSA has these vast powers. After all, we've known this was likely long before 9-11, and historians have even pointed out that the Lincoln Administration had moved to gather information from all telegraph transmissions, so this has been around for a helluva lot longer than the Internet.
The issue is accountability. If you're going to do this level of data gathering, then the citizens have the right to know. Not only do they have the right to know it's going on, but they have the right to expect a reasonable level of accountability.
What has happened here is a vast program that was largely secret, where even Congress was fed marginal information, and which is overseen by a judicial entity (FISA court) that almost never says "No". There has been no accountability. The Executive has simply taken an insanely liberal reading of the Patriot Act and FISA and ran with it, and Congress hasn't even cared enough to bother asking any real questions until Edward Snowden had the balls to hand a British newspaper some internal documents detailing the level and capacity of surveillance.
The point is that the People elect representatives to Congress to, gosh, represent their interests, because, well, the People can't sit around all day every day parked out on Pennsylvania Avenue keeping an eye on the White House. Yes, Americans should be more proactive, but at the same time they should be able to put some faith in all those Representatives and Senators that they're not just there to play pointless political games.
With a nice friendly search engine!
Indeed. All that surveillance of millions of innocent Americans (and presumably that many innocent people throughout the rest of the world) sure did prevent the Boston Marathon attack.
When your surveillance program is not only immoral, but ineffective, then there's not a lot you can do to defend it.
Or hanging out in a Moscow airport waiting for the President to offer the appropriate bribe to Vladimir Putin to have your ass sent back to the United States for the crime of causing the Surveillance State a little trouble.
Sure they lied to Congress. But Congress had the ability to call these bastards in at any time over the last decade. If the Bush and Obama Administrations are guilty of being lying power-abusing peeping toms, then Congress has to accept the blame for being utterly fucking useless. What the fuck is the point of oversight committees that provide no fucking oversight whatsoever?
Everyone from the Founding Fathers onward expected the Executive to play fast and loose and to take as much power as it could at any given moment and push the margins with incredibly liberal, if not outright ludicrous interpretations of law. That has been the nature of the executive branch since the dawn of time. The whole point of Congress is to create a check on that power, to have lawmakers who not only can hold the Executive to account, but can even pass laws to constrain the Executive when it crosses the line.
So what the fuck has the Executive done about this? Even now, a slim majority are to craven and stupid to even moderately hold the Executive to check. Yes, they'll huff and puff and make rude noises, but if they're not outright complicit in what the NSA has been up to since 9-11, then they are as much to blame for not doing the job that the Constitution set out for them.
If not even the subhuman halfwits in Congress believe the claim of 54 plots being discovered, then I fail to see the bright people at Black Hat should be convinced.
And yet they still want to hang Snowden from the highest tree they can find.
What's really happened is that Congress, which has spent the last decade after the Patriot Act was passed jacking off and doing piss all to keep the Executive in check, is now suddenly been embarrassed by the revelations, and wants to look all huffy-and-puffy. But make no mistake, they want Snowden disemboweled just as much as the Administration, if for no other reason than having the audacity to interrupt that partisan circle jerk with some meaningful and critical to the national interest.
Indeed. The problem here isn't encryption, it's trusting commercial CAs that are more than likely providing governments with private keys so these governments can proceed with man-in-the-middle decryption. If you create your own CA and properly manage your private keys, then said governments are out in the cold.
If you generate and secure your own private keys and don't use commercial CAs, then what are they going to do? I suppose they could do what the Iranians and Chinese do, which is to use deep packet inspection to sort out that some or all of your traffic is encrypted, and then block it, but if we've reached that point where Western governments are erecting Great Firewalls, then we've reached a point where we're well and truly screwed anyways.
I'd look for another source of income. Once Redmond pulls the plug, they won't be paying you to astroturf their shit anymore.
Well, I guess you can always go back to your old occupation of giving ten dollar blow jobs in the alleyway.
I've been hearing "the tablet bubble is about to burst" for three years now, and during that time I've seen the number of tablets out there grow and grow and grow. I remember going to a business conference two and a half years ago and there were a couple of iPads in the room and the rest were notebooks and netbooks. I went to a conference last fall and I saw a few notebooks and the rest were iPads and various Android tablets. I went to a small meeting a few months ago with twelve other people, only one had a notebook, about 2/3s had iPads and the rest looked to be either Galaxy Tabs or Nexus 7s.
I have a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse pad combo and when I use it with my Nexus 7, I get a mouse pointer and can use my RDP app for Windows sessions just like I would if I was on a notebook. Screen's a bit small, of course, but when I'm on the road and need to get into the office network post haste, nothing beats it.
I'd happily buy one if it were substantially cheaper and I could tear RT off of it and put Android on, but seeing as they are locked down with an operating system that nobody wants and no way to get it out, fuck 'em.
The news here is that even Microsoft has admitted, albeit indirectly, that RT is an utter failure. All that money and it's still Android and iOS as the market dominators, with Microsoft and Blackberry vying who gets sloppy thirds.
We need more articles filled with sciency words strung together to make word salads so ignoramuses can make money. The only thing I can give the writer of this article for is he didn't put the word "quantum" in any where.
"You have not licensed your replicator to produce chicken soup. Please select either 1. Mealworm-flavored protein muffin or 2. Twinkies"
I can just picture it now.
"I'm sorry, Spluggies Brand Bread did not renew their agreement with your Anus 11 Brand Ultratoaster. This toaster does not authorize the toasting of Spluggies Bread."
"Your milk carton has been determined to come from Canada. The Sphincter X73 Megafridge will not permit you to insert it, as there is no cross-licensing agreement with Canada."
I can just see sites dedicated to rooting your shower so you can use European shampoo and conditioner.
I don't know about you, but I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it.