Of course it's dangerous. It's dangerous because their goal is to "lower the crime rate" indiscriminately. This often means increasing the incarceration rate. This often means increasing the arrest rate for victimless crimes.
Why don't we focus on the incarceration rate and seek to lower it to as low as possible? Why don't we seek to decrease the arrest rate for victimless crimes? Anybody have an answer that isn't racist, sexist, or elitist?
And on the voters who voted for this crud. Surveillance will be abused for political gain and really thats the only reason any of these politicians care to lower the crime rate. You don't see any of these politicians trying to create jobs as a way to lower the crime rate bu they don't mind building prisons and putting cameras everywhere?
Lowering the violence rate, lowering specific types of crime which have victims may make us safer. Lowering the "crime rate." usually raises the incarceration rate which often lowers the income of families making them even more desperate and likely to commit crimes in the future.
Lowering the crime rate is a way to increase the incarceration rate and win political points. It's not going to make anyone safer to for example make massive arrests of drug possession, or to arrest thousands of prostitutes, but thats usually the kind of crime they go after because it's easier. They'll probably go arrest a bunch of small time pot dealers, and crackheads, maybe some prostitutes, and say they lowered the crime rate in the city.
Everyone talks about crime rates and lowering the crime rate. Most criminals are poor so lowering the crime rate would mean that if you aren't rich and sheltered that people you know, grew up with, will probably be going to jail so as to win political points and "lower" the crime rate.
Lowering the crime rate should not be the goal. Protecting citizens should be the goal.
What is more important is how many of your friends and family will be locked up because of all the increased surveillance? Crime rate is a very vague standard of measurement. They didn't say violent crime. They didn't say which crimes. They just said the crime rate is lower which could mean anything or nothing at all. It doesn't mean murder is lower, or rape is lower, it's no different than saying the economy is growing even if its a jobless recovery.
The incarceration rate is too high, and unless this technology can lower the incarceration rate while helping to reduce the rate of violent crime I don't see how this technology will help us. In fact it may make us all into criminals and give the police the power to arrest anyone for any reason.
The incarceration rate is more important to me than the "crime rate." Are there more people in prison as a result of the high technology, or are less people in prison? Just because we become more efficient at catching criminals it doesn't mean society is safer, it all depends on what we consider to be a crime at the time and how we sentence it. The technology doesn't really help one way or the other unless we have sane laws.
My parents couldn't teach my anything about computers.
They couldn't or they didn't? There is a difference. Though I knew it before then, it was reinforced for me in the Army that having to teach a subject could cause the person to learn it. When I was in I spent about 1/2 of my tyme in training and part of that training was that we had to train others. For instance my CO, Commanding Officer, sent me to train for NBC, Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical, decontamination. He sent me there so that when I came back I would train the others in the unit the same thing. There were other things we had to learn on our own before teaching others as well. Even though I didn't use them myself, using manuals I had to learn how to field strip, clean, and reassemble a.45 (only those who fired morters, and I didn't, used them) and an M60 so again I could teach others how to.
If I were a parent without experience or knowledge of computers, I'd try to learn it so I could teach my own children them too. The same with foreign languages. I knew some Chinese, French, and German and I am willing to take classes to relearn them so I can teach them to my own children. Actually my sister's daughter is learning Chinese and my sister wants me to work with my niece to help her learn Chinese.
Falcon
They couldn't. I knew more about computers than they did. I taught them about Windows95, and about the internet and they are still learning from me to this day.
And I also taught computer technology to low income parents in my community. I was the teacher. The problem is that society is changing so quickly and the traps/danger/risks increasing or changing so rapidly, that the older generations simply have no concept of how the world works anymore. They don't understand the risks of Facebook so they cannot tell their teenage son or daughter to avoid using social networking sites. Sure the Obama's might know, but Obama is a law professor so he would be up in the law. The average parent is not a law professor, a lawyer, or a computer scientist, so the average working class parent has nothing they can tell their children about the risks, traps, pitfalls and mistakes that people are making.
This is why you always have kids making the same mistakes over and over. There is no one to warn them. If a certain activity was made illegal just yesterday, only the children whos parents are lawyers are going to know about this change. If your parent isn't a lawyer then you wont even know you broke the law that was just made yesterday. Kids don't even know their rights, and even if they know them they don't know the traps which can result in them losing their rights.
And adults aren't going out of their way to tell them either. All of this talk about test scores wont help. A kid who is not street smart or who has no common sense wont make it in this world regardless of whether they got all As in class or had sparkling test scores. The real test is outside of the classroom and thats where you see good kids doing really dumb things like drinking themselves to death, or drinking and driving, or just getting arrested on drug charges, or other stupid situations which they could have avoided.
The first thing a child has to learn is how to use the internet to keep up with the change. It's really that simple. Going on slashdot to see how technology is changing. Going to the legal blogs to see how the law and law enforcement processes are changing. Analyzing their environment using the internet, seeing patterns and forming conclusions.
This is not something that a test score can test for.A test score cannot teach a child to judge character. A test score cannot determine if a child knows how to use tools in general to better themselves and this includes computers.
Okay, you got by with less resources, why do you think today's students can't do the same?
Falcon
Because something like 5% of people in my situation were able to do what I did. It's not like the majority or even half of people did what I did, but it was literally something where only the best and brightest, or most resourceful of my environment even thought about using the computer or the internet in the way I did.
And among those who did use the computer, a lot of them who were smart enough to do that ended up getting in trouble with the law for hacking with computers. One of the drawbacks of being smart and immature while having access to computers is that you can get into trouble. I was fortunate enough to be young during a period of time before the war on terror, before there was a such thing as "cyber warfare" or any of the concepts you hear being talked about now.
In previous generations being a hacker was literally how you learned. They weren't any books in the library to teach you some things. You couldn't afford classes in college to learn. The only way to learn was to do.
So no in todays environment the laws and rules aren't the same, the standards aren't the same, and so I don't think children should expect to be able to accomplish the same with the same resources when their environment is much more harsh and far more risky, even if you are a computer nerd you can find yourself behind bars. Just look at that kid who was stupid enough to hack Sarah Palins email.
No I don't want a world where children of the future have to be more resourceful than my generation had to be. If the future is worse than the present then we adults are doing something wrong and need to change. We cannot blame the children if it's harder to reach the American dream than it was before. That is our fault.
A kid has a responsibility to be resourceful and determined. A kid has to have the right mentality and that kind of mental toughness cannot be taught. But at the same time we are creating the environments that these kids grow up in, so if they are in environments where they cannot focus on their classes or on anything other than survival, we cannot blame them if their test scores are a bit lower than children in environments where their survival is all but guaranteed.
We have to do studies and look at the level of risk a child grows up in and the test scores that child achieves. If a child is in a safe environment with minimal risk and still has poor test scores THEN we can start blaming the child, the parents, or the technology. We aren't looking at all the statistics when we just look at the technology and the test scores without looking at the risk factors in the environment which these computers and individuals are in.
Democratic accountability might go both ways. If American lives are put at risk because of reports of the actions of the American government, that seems.... balanced? not fair, war's never fair, but reciprocal, perhaps.. In the end you WILL reap what you sow.
It's much more complicated than that. The people who's lives are at stake were just following orders. Just as it would have been illegal if Adrian wouldn't have reported the situation, it's also illegal for a soldier to not follow orders. In fact for a soldier it's much worse because it could equate to treason or mutiny.
I don't think soldiers are responsible for their actions and if their lives are put at risk that would be remarkably unfair. I do think some of the policy decisions have been wrong so I'm in no position to tell anyone whether or not what happened in this case was ethical or unethical because we do not yet know the consequences of these actions. But if the consequences of these actions result in the increased loss of American lives then the consequences are unacceptable.
Honestly from the look of things so far it seems like a tragic situation for everybody involved. It looks as if this kid ruined his own life and now will end up in gitmo or the supermax prison. It looks like Adrian has put his own security at risk by becoming the government witness.
It looks like Wikileaks will actually gain credibility from this situation. It will gain credibility because if anyone is serious about hacking the government or doing these types of whistleblower activities, they now know that Wikileaks is for real and not some sort of honeypot. I think the media attention will attract even more whistleblowers to Wikileaks, and I don't think the majority of them will be stupid about it like that kid.
At the gov is trying to stop Wikileaks by declaring it a terrorist organization. That gives Wikileaks street cred it would not have if this kid were not arrested. Wikileaks is now officially official.
It's not the technology, it's the children not knowing how to use the resources they have. I had less resources than most of these kids and I made it through school,
You got by without the technology but today's students can't? What makes them less capable? Stupidity?
Falcon
I didn't get by without the technology. The only reason I went to college at all is because I had a computer. I'm self educated in a lot of ways that I wouldn't have been if not for the computer.
It's up to the children to use the computer to educate themselves. Parents cannot teach kids to do this.
Parents can not only teach but they can monitor computer usage too. Obviously if the parents don't know how to use computers then they'll have to learn but they can still teach.
Falcon
My parents couldn't teach my anything about computers. My teachers at school couldn't teach me anything about computers. I had to go to the library, to the computer museum, and study with Harvard and MIT students. There simply was nobody at home and nobody at school and I was resourceful enough to look outside of my environment to find the environment I needed to be in and then travel as far as I had to travel to get to it.
In these new environments I learned about linux, and about macs. I learned about HTML and computer programming. I learned how the world wide web worked, what a bit, byte and megabyte was. I learned how a CPU worked, what a transistor, resistor was. I learned about computer networking and how networks worked. I even learned a bit about robotics.
One of these environments (the computer clubhouse) had kids who like me had above average intellect and skill with computers. So just being around people who thought programming was cool influenced me to want to learn it. It's important that kids have the right environment when they are introduced to computers. It's also important that kids have the right friends.
Clubs were the answer in the past, today the answer might be computer camp. The parent should enlist their son or daughter into computer camp during the summer and buy the computer after the kid asks for it. Don't buy the computer because you think the kid is ready, you wait until the kid tells you they want a computer and can explain why they want it.
talk about the pedophile elite on the other hand, what evidence do they have that this pedophile elite even exists?
It's called the Catholic Church's program of relocating child molesting priests, heard of it? In fact the pope has been implicated in having personally been involved in relocating molesters. How much more elite does it get?
The law gets tweaked for political reasons, think of the drug laws which were tweaked in the 80s and resulted in over a million prisoners in the USA.
I think you mean "Economic reasons". Or did we not notice the coincidence of prison privatization?
There might be a few elite pedophiles but there is no "pedophile elite." There is a difference. And the Prison Industrial Complex I see in the same way and light as I see racial slavery. It's no accident that most of the millions of prisoners are black and brown. This is just a way to make people work for free in a prison type camp.
First of all it wasn't Wikileaks that caused this kid to be captured. It was this kid behaving in a dumb impetuous fashion that caused him to be captured. Typical hacker kid who pulls off an exploit and then brags about it to his friends. It's always the situation that individuals who brag get caught.
On top of that he was messing with the US gov, this means all the alphabet agencies were hunting him and he goes and tells Adrian Lamo? The entire situation is ridiculous and comical in my opinion.
What isn't comical is the fact that if there really are all these thousands of classified documents and if American lives really are at stake here, thats not funny at all. I don't know the details of the situation, but if the goal was to discredit Wikileaks it may actually have the opposite effect.
What I don't understand is why this kid could be so smart as to have the technical skill to pull off that kind of operation but then be so dumb as to communicate in plaintext over AOL.
This is as stupid as just emailing a confession. The kid wasn't even smart enough to know about PGP.
Wouldn't the NSA and FBI have the ability to see the entire conversation? Lets face it, the kid was impetuous and stupid. He's also very young and it's to be expected. The fact is what he did was illegal and the fact that it's illegal AND he talked about it on the government monitored internet is what makes him so dumb.
It's like if Bin Laden would go on AIM and go to Jihad.com and chat.
Your post nails it. This is what makes the difference between kids who learn to self educate and kids who don't. I learned the hard way that teachers didn't like answering "why" questions when I got kicked out of class for asking too many questions.
The internet never complained that I was asking too many questions and I took complete advantage of that.
I wish the luddities would stop trying to blame the technology. It's here to stay. Get over it. If you're seriously telling me a 16 year old without exposure to computers is better off in the modern world, I'll ask you to please dispose of the drugs.
If you have a 10-14 year old who suddenly gets access to a computer and all the distractions that come with it - games, (and shock horror porn if they can get to it0 etc. - you can expect a dip while the child adjusts. If the same kid had grown up with these things it'd be no big deal. I don't doubt that cable TV would have the same effect. All these things require some supervision in their use. But then so does a soccer or basket ball. Kids can find that distracting too.
I learned about computers BEFORE I had my first computer. My exposure to computers was at the library, then it was at the computer clubhouse. I did get my own computer until I turned 17. By the time I got my computer I knew the internet would replace the library and that by having a computer I would have everything I would ever need to educate myself.
I took advantage of the computer to educate myself BEYOND what I was being taught at school. I would go to school all day and be on the internet all night and I wouldn't just play games, I would learn programming languages, learn how computers work, learn how to properly write via the word processor, learn everything from history to psychology, to sociology to physics. This was before there was a wikipedia, back before Google was popular.
The internet and computers ARE the new libraries. They are a learning device and it's up to parents and adults to introduce computers as a device to use for self education. The problem is most parents dont know how to use the computer themselves so their kids don't know. Most kids just aren't that smart to begin with and aren't self motivated, and their parents tend to know less about the technology than their kids and teachers know less than their parents.
What do you expect? If a teacher cannot tell their students about good websites to self educate, how do they expect the children to improve their test scores? If the teacher cannot tell the children how to use a word processor or to go to math.com thats the fault of the teacher. If the teacher cannot post videos up on Youtube thats the teachers fault if students cannot review the teachings after class. Maybe if teachers made Youtube videos instead of giving homework the test scores would improve. USE THE TECHNOLOGY AND STOP BLAMING IT!
A nation of engineers who can't invent anything but who can build everything. Thats not to say China hasn't invented anything in the past, but the proof is in the pudding. If test scores mattered then the Chinese would be inventing everything.
Test scores do not matter. Test scores wont make you a better computer programmer, or a better creative writer, or a better athlete, or a better artist, or a better psychologist, or a better doctor.
>>In disadvantaged households, parents are less likely to monitor children's computer use and guide children in using computers for educational purposes.
Which is why the entire digital divide issue is stupid, in my opinion.
Unless a kid is growing up without any exposure to computers at all, he'll be technologically proficient by the time he graduates. Study after study show that using technology often hurts, instead of helps, student performance.
I say this as someone who teaches teachers how to use technology in the classroom, and I start every lecture by saying, "Only use it when there's a damn good reason to do so."
And there *are* good reasons to do so. Sometimes. But the way that most schools use computers is nothing short of neglect.
Because performance at the college level requires a computer. You aren't going to be able to get anything done if you don't use a word processor, Google, Wikipedia, along with using the library. The simple fact is most kids don't know how to properly use a computer to study, or how to properly use a word processor, or how to properly find books in a library, or how to properly cite sources in MLA format, or how to properly educate themselves.
It's not the technology, it's the children not knowing how to use the resources they have. I had less resources than most of these kids and I made it through school, the fact that current generations have more resources does not mean current generation have mentors or adults to train them on how to use the internet. Most of the teachers and adults in these neighborhoods know less about the internet than their children and this is the source of the problem.
It's up to the children to use the computer to educate themselves. Parents cannot teach kids to do this. It should be schools that teach children how to browse Wikipedia and what to search for on Google.I was a "disadvantaged" youth who used the computer and the library to make it through the school system and graduate college. It can be done.
It's always done in this order. First you create the surveillance technology so you can see everything everyone does at all times. Then you build the prisons in secret and claim they are just for "terrorists", or "pedophiles" or the "jews" or whomever. Then you hire the cops, lots and lots of cops.
Now that you have lots of surveillance, lots of prison space, and lots of cops, the final move is to tweak the laws so that you can fill the prisons with criminals. It works 100% of the time in any society. Hitler did it, Stalin did it, Mao did it, they all do it. Who are the criminals?
The criminals are whoever the lawmakers say are the criminals. The terrorists are whoever the lawmakers say are the terrorists. The jews are whoever the lawmakers say are the jews. The communists are whoever the lawmakers say are the communists.
And if you don't fit the definition of whoever they want in prison, they can always change the law at the last minute and criminalize whatever it is that you do. If you eat fried chicken, possession of fried chicken can be made illegal tomorrow. If you break ANY of the ten commandments, any sin you make can be made illegal at the stroke of Obama's pen. It's not supposed to be fair.
Even if Hitler was 60+ years ago, he actually did try to take over the world. The talk about the pedophile elite on the other hand, what evidence do they have that this pedophile elite even exists? And even if it does exist somewhere, it's probably not going to be in the sort of numbers that would require this level of surveillance.
I know there are pedophiles, rapists, and generally sick individuals in the world. But most estimates are that it's less than 5% of the population. Even in prison it's less than 5% of prisoners. So we are getting into a frenzy over a fear that isn't based on any known statistics.
If they come out with a statistic that 20% of the people on the internet are rapists, pedophiles, terrorists, or just all around dangerous individuals, then maybe putting surveillance on the internet to protect the children makes sense. But to do this level of surveillance without there being millions of dangerous criminals, risks creating an environment where the technology itself and the political pressure PRODUCES the criminals AFTER the fact.
Do we expect them to built the technology, the prisons, and hire a bunch of cops, and not use it against us? Once the technology, the prisons, and the cops are in place, then it's just a matter of tweaking the laws so as to generate as many or as few criminals as they want.
That is the problem. The laws create the criminals, the technology and cops catch the criminals, and the prisons house them. Usually the technology comes first, then the prisons get built, then the cops get hired, and finally the laws are tweaked so that it looks like the cops are doing their jobs. The law gets tweaked for political reasons, think of the drug laws which were tweaked in the 80s and resulted in over a million prisoners in the USA.
Logic and reason are behind "think of the children." It's really "think of the profit losses." The corporations that cannot make a profit off the internet have decided to fundamentally change the nature of the internet itself to rig the game. When album sales aren't good they never think that maybe album sales drop when the economy is bad. They never take note of the fact that when the economy is doing good the album and movie sales rise. They only look at the internet as something they cannot control and they don't like it when you and your friends download mp3s or avi's. So they want to monitor the entire internet so they know who to sue.
While there are pedophiles and terrorists, the majority of individuals on the internet are not pedophiles or terrorists. In fact I'm willing to bet that less than 1% of people on the internet are pedophiles or terrorists. On the other hand probably more than half of the internet is downloading mp3s and avi's. And it's the very young college aged individuals who do this the most.
So what would the result of this surveillance be? More young people being punished and either locked up in prison or sued into even deeper debt. It's another way to keep young people in debt. I suppose if you were smart enough not to take out college loans, and smart enough not to use credit cards, you still might have been dumb enough to use bearshare or limewire.
It's ultimately not a solution to increase surveillance unless it's TRULY going to be done in a way that the results of this unlimited surveillance does not result in increased criminal prosecutions. If the increased surveillance is supposed to result in an increase in crime and an increase in criminal prosecutions, this means an increase in the amount of prisons being built, which means there will be a need to fill them up, and you'll have the same "War on Drugs" type of situation in Europe via these laws that the USA has.
Get ready to have a million + prisoners. If they are SERIOUS about going after terrorists then they need to limit the scope of when this technology can be applied. If they basically apply it to every kind of possible crime then the results will be obvious and this will be bad for the economy of Europe and for the "children." as they say.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's dangerous. It's dangerous because their goal is to "lower the crime rate" indiscriminately. This often means increasing the incarceration rate. This often means increasing the arrest rate for victimless crimes.
Why don't we focus on the incarceration rate and seek to lower it to as low as possible? Why don't we seek to decrease the arrest rate for victimless crimes? Anybody have an answer that isn't racist, sexist, or elitist?
And on the voters who voted for this crud. Surveillance will be abused for political gain and really thats the only reason any of these politicians care to lower the crime rate. You don't see any of these politicians trying to create jobs as a way to lower the crime rate bu they don't mind building prisons and putting cameras everywhere?
Bigots have to worry about becoming criminals twice.
Lowering the violence rate, lowering specific types of crime which have victims may make us safer. Lowering the "crime rate." usually raises the incarceration rate which often lowers the income of families making them even more desperate and likely to commit crimes in the future.
Lowering the crime rate is a way to increase the incarceration rate and win political points. It's not going to make anyone safer to for example make massive arrests of drug possession, or to arrest thousands of prostitutes, but thats usually the kind of crime they go after because it's easier. They'll probably go arrest a bunch of small time pot dealers, and crackheads, maybe some prostitutes, and say they lowered the crime rate in the city.
Everyone talks about crime rates and lowering the crime rate. Most criminals are poor so lowering the crime rate would mean that if you aren't rich and sheltered that people you know, grew up with, will probably be going to jail so as to win political points and "lower" the crime rate.
Lowering the crime rate should not be the goal. Protecting citizens should be the goal.
What is more important is how many of your friends and family will be locked up because of all the increased surveillance?
Crime rate is a very vague standard of measurement. They didn't say violent crime. They didn't say which crimes. They just said the crime rate is lower which could mean anything or nothing at all. It doesn't mean murder is lower, or rape is lower, it's no different than saying the economy is growing even if its a jobless recovery.
The incarceration rate is too high, and unless this technology can lower the incarceration rate while helping to reduce the rate of violent crime I don't see how this technology will help us. In fact it may make us all into criminals and give the police the power to arrest anyone for any reason.
The incarceration rate is more important to me than the "crime rate." Are there more people in prison as a result of the high technology, or are less people in prison? Just because we become more efficient at catching criminals it doesn't mean society is safer, it all depends on what we consider to be a crime at the time and how we sentence it. The technology doesn't really help one way or the other unless we have sane laws.
My parents couldn't teach my anything about computers.
They couldn't or they didn't? There is a difference. Though I knew it before then, it was reinforced for me in the Army that having to teach a subject could cause the person to learn it. When I was in I spent about 1/2 of my tyme in training and part of that training was that we had to train others. For instance my CO, Commanding Officer, sent me to train for NBC, Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical, decontamination. He sent me there so that when I came back I would train the others in the unit the same thing. There were other things we had to learn on our own before teaching others as well. Even though I didn't use them myself, using manuals I had to learn how to field strip, clean, and reassemble a .45 (only those who fired morters, and I didn't, used them) and an M60 so again I could teach others how to.
If I were a parent without experience or knowledge of computers, I'd try to learn it so I could teach my own children them too. The same with foreign languages. I knew some Chinese, French, and German and I am willing to take classes to relearn them so I can teach them to my own children. Actually my sister's daughter is learning Chinese and my sister wants me to work with my niece to help her learn Chinese.
Falcon
They couldn't. I knew more about computers than they did. I taught them about Windows95, and about the internet and they are still learning from me to this day.
And I also taught computer technology to low income parents in my community. I was the teacher.
The problem is that society is changing so quickly and the traps/danger/risks increasing or changing so rapidly, that the older generations simply have no concept of how the world works anymore. They don't understand the risks of Facebook so they cannot tell their teenage son or daughter to avoid using social networking sites. Sure the Obama's might know, but Obama is a law professor so he would be up in the law. The average parent is not a law professor, a lawyer, or a computer scientist, so the average working class parent has nothing they can tell their children about the risks, traps, pitfalls and mistakes that people are making.
This is why you always have kids making the same mistakes over and over. There is no one to warn them. If a certain activity was made illegal just yesterday, only the children whos parents are lawyers are going to know about this change. If your parent isn't a lawyer then you wont even know you broke the law that was just made yesterday. Kids don't even know their rights, and even if they know them they don't know the traps which can result in them losing their rights.
And adults aren't going out of their way to tell them either. All of this talk about test scores wont help. A kid who is not street smart or who has no common sense wont make it in this world regardless of whether they got all As in class or had sparkling test scores. The real test is outside of the classroom and thats where you see good kids doing really dumb things like drinking themselves to death, or drinking and driving, or just getting arrested on drug charges, or other stupid situations which they could have avoided.
The first thing a child has to learn is how to use the internet to keep up with the change. It's really that simple. Going on slashdot to see how technology is changing. Going to the legal blogs to see how the law and law enforcement processes are changing. Analyzing their environment using the internet, seeing patterns and forming conclusions.
This is not something that a test score can test for.A test score cannot teach a child to judge character. A test score cannot determine if a child knows how to use tools in general to better themselves and this includes computers.
All tools have to be us
Okay, you got by with less resources, why do you think today's students can't do the same?
Falcon
Because something like 5% of people in my situation were able to do what I did. It's not like the majority or even half of people did what I did, but it was literally something where only the best and brightest, or most resourceful of my environment even thought about using the computer or the internet in the way I did.
And among those who did use the computer, a lot of them who were smart enough to do that ended up getting in trouble with the law for hacking with computers. One of the drawbacks of being smart and immature while having access to computers is that you can get into trouble. I was fortunate enough to be young during a period of time before the war on terror, before there was a such thing as "cyber warfare" or any of the concepts you hear being talked about now.
In previous generations being a hacker was literally how you learned. They weren't any books in the library to teach you some things. You couldn't afford classes in college to learn. The only way to learn was to do.
So no in todays environment the laws and rules aren't the same, the standards aren't the same, and so I don't think children should expect to be able to accomplish the same with the same resources when their environment is much more harsh and far more risky, even if you are a computer nerd you can find yourself behind bars. Just look at that kid who was stupid enough to hack Sarah Palins email.
No I don't want a world where children of the future have to be more resourceful than my generation had to be. If the future is worse than the present then we adults are doing something wrong and need to change. We cannot blame the children if it's harder to reach the American dream than it was before. That is our fault.
A kid has a responsibility to be resourceful and determined. A kid has to have the right mentality and that kind of mental toughness cannot be taught. But at the same time we are creating the environments that these kids grow up in, so if they are in environments where they cannot focus on their classes or on anything other than survival, we cannot blame them if their test scores are a bit lower than children in environments where their survival is all but guaranteed.
We have to do studies and look at the level of risk a child grows up in and the test scores that child achieves. If a child is in a safe environment with minimal risk and still has poor test scores THEN we can start blaming the child, the parents, or the technology. We aren't looking at all the statistics when we just look at the technology and the test scores without looking at the risk factors in the environment which these computers and individuals are in.
and if American lives really are at stake here
Democratic accountability might go both ways. If American lives are put at risk because of reports of the actions of the American government, that seems.... balanced? not fair, war's never fair, but reciprocal, perhaps.. In the end you WILL reap what you sow.
It's much more complicated than that. The people who's lives are at stake were just following orders. Just as it would have been illegal if Adrian wouldn't have reported the situation, it's also illegal for a soldier to not follow orders. In fact for a soldier it's much worse because it could equate to treason or mutiny.
I don't think soldiers are responsible for their actions and if their lives are put at risk that would be remarkably unfair. I do think some of the policy decisions have been wrong so I'm in no position to tell anyone whether or not what happened in this case was ethical or unethical because we do not yet know the consequences of these actions. But if the consequences of these actions result in the increased loss of American lives then the consequences are unacceptable.
Honestly from the look of things so far it seems like a tragic situation for everybody involved. It looks as if this kid ruined his own life and now will end up in gitmo or the supermax prison. It looks like Adrian has put his own security at risk by becoming the government witness.
It looks like Wikileaks will actually gain credibility from this situation. It will gain credibility because if anyone is serious about hacking the government or doing these types of whistleblower activities, they now know that Wikileaks is for real and not some sort of honeypot. I think the media attention will attract even more whistleblowers to Wikileaks, and I don't think the majority of them will be stupid about it like that kid.
At the gov is trying to stop Wikileaks by declaring it a terrorist organization. That gives Wikileaks street cred it would not have if this kid were not arrested. Wikileaks is now officially official.
It's not the technology, it's the children not knowing how to use the resources they have. I had less resources than most of these kids and I made it through school,
You got by without the technology but today's students can't? What makes them less capable? Stupidity?
Falcon
I didn't get by without the technology. The only reason I went to college at all is because I had a computer. I'm self educated in a lot of ways that I wouldn't have been if not for the computer.
It's up to the children to use the computer to educate themselves. Parents cannot teach kids to do this.
Parents can not only teach but they can monitor computer usage too. Obviously if the parents don't know how to use computers then they'll have to learn but they can still teach.
Falcon
My parents couldn't teach my anything about computers. My teachers at school couldn't teach me anything about computers. I had to go to the library, to the computer museum, and study with Harvard and MIT students. There simply was nobody at home and nobody at school and I was resourceful enough to look outside of my environment to find the environment I needed to be in and then travel as far as I had to travel to get to it.
In these new environments I learned about linux, and about macs. I learned about HTML and computer programming. I learned how the world wide web worked, what a bit, byte and megabyte was. I learned how a CPU worked, what a transistor, resistor was. I learned about computer networking and how networks worked. I even learned a bit about robotics.
One of these environments (the computer clubhouse) had kids who like me had above average intellect and skill with computers. So just being around people who thought programming was cool influenced me to want to learn it. It's important that kids have the right environment when they are introduced to computers. It's also important that kids have the right friends.
Clubs were the answer in the past, today the answer might be computer camp. The parent should enlist their son or daughter into computer camp during the summer and buy the computer after the kid asks for it. Don't buy the computer because you think the kid is ready, you wait until the kid tells you they want a computer and can explain why they want it.
talk about the pedophile elite on the other hand, what evidence do they have that this pedophile elite even exists?
It's called the Catholic Church's program of relocating child molesting priests, heard of it? In fact the pope has been implicated in having personally been involved in relocating molesters. How much more elite does it get?
The law gets tweaked for political reasons, think of the drug laws which were tweaked in the 80s and resulted in over a million prisoners in the USA.
I think you mean "Economic reasons". Or did we not notice the coincidence of prison privatization?
There might be a few elite pedophiles but there is no "pedophile elite." There is a difference. And the Prison Industrial Complex I see in the same way and light as I see racial slavery. It's no accident that most of the millions of prisoners are black and brown. This is just a way to make people work for free in a prison type camp.
First of all it wasn't Wikileaks that caused this kid to be captured. It was this kid behaving in a dumb impetuous fashion that caused him to be captured. Typical hacker kid who pulls off an exploit and then brags about it to his friends. It's always the situation that individuals who brag get caught.
On top of that he was messing with the US gov, this means all the alphabet agencies were hunting him and he goes and tells Adrian Lamo? The entire situation is ridiculous and comical in my opinion.
What isn't comical is the fact that if there really are all these thousands of classified documents and if American lives really are at stake here, thats not funny at all. I don't know the details of the situation, but if the goal was to discredit Wikileaks it may actually have the opposite effect.
What I don't understand is why this kid could be so smart as to have the technical skill to pull off that kind of operation but then be so dumb as to communicate in plaintext over AOL.
This is as stupid as just emailing a confession. The kid wasn't even smart enough to know about PGP.
Obviously he doesn't know enough to know that the NSA can read that? He's an idiot.
Wouldn't the NSA and FBI have the ability to see the entire conversation?
Lets face it, the kid was impetuous and stupid. He's also very young and it's to be expected. The fact is what he did was illegal and the fact that it's illegal AND he talked about it on the government monitored internet is what makes him so dumb.
It's like if Bin Laden would go on AIM and go to Jihad.com and chat.
Your post nails it. This is what makes the difference between kids who learn to self educate and kids who don't. I learned the hard way that teachers didn't like answering "why" questions when I got kicked out of class for asking too many questions.
The internet never complained that I was asking too many questions and I took complete advantage of that.
I wish the luddities would stop trying to blame the technology. It's here to stay. Get over it. If you're seriously telling me a 16 year old without exposure to computers is better off in the modern world, I'll ask you to please dispose of the drugs.
If you have a 10-14 year old who suddenly gets access to a computer and all the distractions that come with it - games, (and shock horror porn if they can get to it0 etc. - you can expect a dip while the child adjusts. If the same kid had grown up with these things it'd be no big deal. I don't doubt that cable TV would have the same effect. All these things require some supervision in their use. But then so does a soccer or basket ball. Kids can find that distracting too.
I learned about computers BEFORE I had my first computer. My exposure to computers was at the library, then it was at the computer clubhouse. I did get my own computer until I turned 17. By the time I got my computer I knew the internet would replace the library and that by having a computer I would have everything I would ever need to educate myself.
I took advantage of the computer to educate myself BEYOND what I was being taught at school. I would go to school all day and be on the internet all night and I wouldn't just play games, I would learn programming languages, learn how computers work, learn how to properly write via the word processor, learn everything from history to psychology, to sociology to physics. This was before there was a wikipedia, back before Google was popular.
The internet and computers ARE the new libraries. They are a learning device and it's up to parents and adults to introduce computers as a device to use for self education. The problem is most parents dont know how to use the computer themselves so their kids don't know. Most kids just aren't that smart to begin with and aren't self motivated, and their parents tend to know less about the technology than their kids and teachers know less than their parents.
What do you expect? If a teacher cannot tell their students about good websites to self educate, how do they expect the children to improve their test scores? If the teacher cannot tell the children how to use a word processor or to go to math.com thats the fault of the teacher. If the teacher cannot post videos up on Youtube thats the teachers fault if students cannot review the teachings after class. Maybe if teachers made Youtube videos instead of giving homework the test scores would improve. USE THE TECHNOLOGY AND STOP BLAMING IT!
A nation of engineers who can't invent anything but who can build everything.
Thats not to say China hasn't invented anything in the past, but the proof is in the pudding. If test scores mattered then the Chinese would be inventing everything.
Test scores do not matter. Test scores wont make you a better computer programmer, or a better creative writer, or a better athlete, or a better artist, or a better psychologist, or a better doctor.
>>In disadvantaged households, parents are less likely to monitor children's computer use and guide children in using computers for educational purposes.
Which is why the entire digital divide issue is stupid, in my opinion.
Unless a kid is growing up without any exposure to computers at all, he'll be technologically proficient by the time he graduates. Study after study show that using technology often hurts, instead of helps, student performance.
I say this as someone who teaches teachers how to use technology in the classroom, and I start every lecture by saying, "Only use it when there's a damn good reason to do so."
And there *are* good reasons to do so. Sometimes. But the way that most schools use computers is nothing short of neglect.
Because performance at the college level requires a computer. You aren't going to be able to get anything done if you don't use a word processor, Google, Wikipedia, along with using the library. The simple fact is most kids don't know how to properly use a computer to study, or how to properly use a word processor, or how to properly find books in a library, or how to properly cite sources in MLA format, or how to properly educate themselves.
It's not the technology, it's the children not knowing how to use the resources they have. I had less resources than most of these kids and I made it through school, the fact that current generations have more resources does not mean current generation have mentors or adults to train them on how to use the internet. Most of the teachers and adults in these neighborhoods know less about the internet than their children and this is the source of the problem.
It's up to the children to use the computer to educate themselves. Parents cannot teach kids to do this. It should be schools that teach children how to browse Wikipedia and what to search for on Google.I was a "disadvantaged" youth who used the computer and the library to make it through the school system and graduate college. It can be done.
It's always done in this order. First you create the surveillance technology so you can see everything everyone does at all times. Then you build the prisons in secret and claim they are just for "terrorists", or "pedophiles" or the "jews" or whomever. Then you hire the cops, lots and lots of cops.
Now that you have lots of surveillance, lots of prison space, and lots of cops, the final move is to tweak the laws so that you can fill the prisons with criminals. It works 100% of the time in any society. Hitler did it, Stalin did it, Mao did it, they all do it. Who are the criminals?
The criminals are whoever the lawmakers say are the criminals. The terrorists are whoever the lawmakers say are the terrorists. The jews are whoever the lawmakers say are the jews. The communists are whoever the lawmakers say are the communists.
And if you don't fit the definition of whoever they want in prison, they can always change the law at the last minute and criminalize whatever it is that you do. If you eat fried chicken, possession of fried chicken can be made illegal tomorrow. If you break ANY of the ten commandments, any sin you make can be made illegal at the stroke of Obama's pen. It's not supposed to be fair.
Even if Hitler was 60+ years ago, he actually did try to take over the world. The talk about the pedophile elite on the other hand, what evidence do they have that this pedophile elite even exists? And even if it does exist somewhere, it's probably not going to be in the sort of numbers that would require this level of surveillance.
I know there are pedophiles, rapists, and generally sick individuals in the world. But most estimates are that it's less than 5% of the population. Even in prison it's less than 5% of prisoners. So we are getting into a frenzy over a fear that isn't based on any known statistics.
If they come out with a statistic that 20% of the people on the internet are rapists, pedophiles, terrorists, or just all around dangerous individuals, then maybe putting surveillance on the internet to protect the children makes sense. But to do this level of surveillance without there being millions of dangerous criminals, risks creating an environment where the technology itself and the political pressure PRODUCES the criminals AFTER the fact.
Do we expect them to built the technology, the prisons, and hire a bunch of cops, and not use it against us? Once the technology, the prisons, and the cops are in place, then it's just a matter of tweaking the laws so as to generate as many or as few criminals as they want.
That is the problem. The laws create the criminals, the technology and cops catch the criminals, and the prisons house them. Usually the technology comes first, then the prisons get built, then the cops get hired, and finally the laws are tweaked so that it looks like the cops are doing their jobs. The law gets tweaked for political reasons, think of the drug laws which were tweaked in the 80s and resulted in over a million prisoners in the USA.
Logic and reason are behind "think of the children." It's really "think of the profit losses." The corporations that cannot make a profit off the internet have decided to fundamentally change the nature of the internet itself to rig the game. When album sales aren't good they never think that maybe album sales drop when the economy is bad. They never take note of the fact that when the economy is doing good the album and movie sales rise. They only look at the internet as something they cannot control and they don't like it when you and your friends download mp3s or avi's. So they want to monitor the entire internet so they know who to sue.
While there are pedophiles and terrorists, the majority of individuals on the internet are not pedophiles or terrorists. In fact I'm willing to bet that less than 1% of people on the internet are pedophiles or terrorists. On the other hand probably more than half of the internet is downloading mp3s and avi's. And it's the very young college aged individuals who do this the most.
So what would the result of this surveillance be? More young people being punished and either locked up in prison or sued into even deeper debt. It's another way to keep young people in debt. I suppose if you were smart enough not to take out college loans, and smart enough not to use credit cards, you still might have been dumb enough to use bearshare or limewire.
It's ultimately not a solution to increase surveillance unless it's TRULY going to be done in a way that the results of this unlimited surveillance does not result in increased criminal prosecutions. If the increased surveillance is supposed to result in an increase in crime and an increase in criminal prosecutions, this means an increase in the amount of prisons being built, which means there will be a need to fill them up, and you'll have the same "War on Drugs" type of situation in Europe via these laws that the USA has.
Get ready to have a million + prisoners. If they are SERIOUS about going after terrorists then they need to limit the scope of when this technology can be applied. If they basically apply it to every kind of possible crime then the results will be obvious and this will be bad for the economy of Europe and for the "children." as they say.