I understand your very well presented point. I'll focus on one bit, if you don't mind: "...someone lacking extensive training in biochemistry/virology would not be able to reproduce the virus from this work from the experimental section of the their paper."
The problem comes in when you have people are are extensively trained in biochemistry/virology who might be able to do something with the information under discussion.
Similarly, it's not beyond believe to think that the organizations (in Mexico for example) making meth might be able to take your research and do something with it, even if the home brewers couldn't.
But this information or discovery wasn't really new. It's something people who know virology already learned. It's only novel in that the details and virus studied but not in the methods.
If someone is extensively trained in biochemistry/virology we have an FBI to monitor them. Of course anyone trained can do a lot of damage, anyone educated can do a lot of damage, but that has always been the case.
Eco-terrorists might support population reduction but it wont work because some of the population will have the money to buy vaccines, masks, and simply wait it out while others wont.
All that will happen is certain groups will find a vaccine and make the virus innocuous to them. Others in poorer countries or less educated places will die. Not all that different from what happened with HIV.
And one form of terrorism is bioterrorism. That kind of population reduction would even the score.
And you're wrong in thinking this sort of virus cannot be controlled. A vaccine could actually make large portions of the population immune. The vaccine itself might not be perfect but it would result in preserving some populations.
There are two problems with your comparison. The first is that evidence suggests that Al Qaeda would be perfectly happy to exterminate the same populations that Hitler wished to exterminate (it is even its goal to exterminate several of them). The second is that Hitler would not have been interested in this virus because it would not have selectively targeted the populations he wished to exterminate. It would have also exterminated to the same degree the population that he wished to promulgate, especially considering that most of the populations he wished to exterminate were mixed in among the populations he wished to advance.
So Hitler would give the vaccine to the population he wanted to spare in advance and then spread the infection.
Hitler would have loved to have a flu that could completely exterminate certain populations. And many of his followers would love to create a flu like this and distribute it to certain countries and populations.
You're right it's dangerous and most nationalists wont want to use bioweapons but there are certain situations where it could and would be used even by nationalist governments.
Why not use a rolling window of encryption keys, and publish the keys after 24 hours or so? That way, criminals can't make use of real time updates on police status, but the police are still required to keep their asses clean on the radio?
That's still not a good enough compromise unless we get the same privacy from the police. The point is the police want to watch everyone for no reason or perhaps for political reasons, but they don't expect to be put under the same scrutiny as everybody else?
The police should be put under just as much scrutiny by the community as they put on the community. The police if they have to keep something secret should not be communicating it. The rare example is that a SWAT team might need to conduct an operation but honestly how rare is this?
If it has to be something serious let the FBI or the feds handle it. Why empower the local cop? If there is a terrorist problem let the feds solve it. Don't militarize the local cops in our neighborhoods and think it can lead to anything good because we all know once the laws change so that we are the new enemy or terrorist or criminal all that new technology will be turned on us.
This has nothing to do with safety, this is to mute the press. The press follows the scanner conversations to report on all accidents and incidents. With police hiding records and conversations due to lawsuits, we dont need more "hidden" police communications, we them open to keep them honest.
Its bad enough the PR for police is on TV, almost 1/2 of the line up are some cop based shows, perfect cops fighting evil criminals.
In reality, we have a growing movement in the US to keep police honest due to the mega lawsuits in almost every major city. I'm in Seattle, and the police abuse is way out of hand here. The internal coverups, the blue code of silence, the getting ride of whistle blowers, the incompetent police are costing this state with awards and settlements in the millions. Its also sad that the state budget hides these lawsuits. The most open lawsuit loses, department of transportation, they list every payout in our budget. We need that detail for police.
The same logic that the police applies to our community should be applied to the police. If you don't have something to hide and you aren't doing anything wrong why do you need encryption?
The police are going around pepper spraying protesters, and arresting people for possession of drugs but they want privacy and secrecy so they can more efficiently plot against ordinary non-violent Americans?
they are hiding their communications from the public, I guess they have things to hide.
This will be cracked, but of-course it will be declared illegal to brake these communications (and DMCA can be used for this).
Police are just the tools in the hands of the lawless corrupt governments that are used to force the population to obey the power.
Because if they are serving the public interest they shouldn't mind if the public sees what they do and how they work. What do they have to hide and why are they doing this now?
I see no reason why the community shouldn't watch the police. If the police aren't corrupt and aren't breaking the law or doing anything wrong why do they have to hide their communications?
There is a real argument that realtime police communications requires secrecy to protect police and their operations while they do the majority of their work that is indeed properly protecting the public.
But there is also a real argument that hiding those communications also hides lots of the minority of their work that at best doesn't protect the public, some of which severely harms the public.
These arguments don't conflict when the realtime parameter is removed. Both legitimate cop business and legitimate public protection are served if all these comms are published after some short delay. Like the following day, or perhaps even just a few hours later.
Publishing them also removes the advantage that some people have who can spend on equipment to monitor the comms. Instead any interested member of the public can check them. All of them, compared to audited logs of the activity on the cops comms equipment. The publication order has to have teeth, prosecuting people for obstructing justice when they're hiding cop comms they find inconvenient to reveal.
But if most arrests are for stupid stuff which most of the public doesn't believe is in the interest of protesting the public then the public has a good argument that the police should be watched and watched carefully. Yes there could be a serial killer or some violent criminal out there but why would the police need encrypted communication for something like that?
Also you have to understand that if the police have the right to privacy but you don't, the police can abuse this to scheme and plot operations against your community which may be entirely political in nature.
I am a member of the public and a criminal. I am against this. I need to know when and where the police are coming after me. I have rights, you know. information wants to be free!
Anyone who isn't a criminal can be made into a criminal at the stroke of a pen.
And, I don't mean getting busted by the graders. I mean, if you're not really learning the content, how do you get away with not understanding the fundamentals when you get to higher class levels. Seems like it would eventually catch up with you.
College is generally easy. The only reason to cheat would be to get into elite schools. It's not hard to cheat either if you're truly smart but it is hard to cheat and not get caught for the reason that cheating does take a bit of team work.
When the project is over, it is extremely easy to get another one. I used to be an overseas contractor for the DoD and after every contract (usually 1 year contracts), it was very easy to get another one if you didn't mind moving to another location. I ended up all over Asia in a span of 10 years doing that. They still had contracts left, but I ended my services with them because I moved to Europe and they didn't have much going on there at the time.
That depends on a lot of factors. Still if it weren't cheaper for them to pay contractors they would just hire employees. It's obviously cheaper.
Been working Federal IT at various agencies for 20 years and the story is the same today as it was twenty years ago. You can't reach high quality/niche programmers on the Federal pay scale in the DC area. Scoff if you want, but we just had a top notch contractor successfully apply and get an offer for Federal work, only to turn down $137K plus bens. Great candidate, couldn't reach his rate. I've seen this time and time again.
That same contractor bills out near $300K per annum.
The system is skewed towards the contracting companies. Keeping Federal IT pay rates down below the industry average for our area guarantees big pay days for the contracting companies. These companies were supposed to be a panacea for the inefficient Federal worker. All that they have become is YAFE (yet another Federal entitlement).
And yes, some of the contractors have been in the same position for DECADES. Same lifetime entitlement.
Where do you get the idea that a contractor is entitled? When the project is over the contractor is out of a job. So the overall cost of the contractor isn't as much as the employee who can't be fired and who gets all sorts of benefits.
He means that the non-outsourced non-contract employees are unions, and so hard to fire, that a contract one is "easier". But that "ease" doesn't seem to take wasting taxpayer money into account.
It's much more cost effective to get rid of all the benefits that government employees have considering that contractors receive no benefits and do exactly the same work. Those benefits are a waste of money right?
Then they should be subject to thrice as much scrutiny and thrice as many penalties.
But they aren't really paid twice as much. It's a myth that they are. If you are a contractor you get more cash, but yo ustill have to buy your health insurance, pay your own retirement, pay for all the benefits government employees take for granted.
The only reason to use Contractors are the tax benefits and the fact that it's just better in a lot of ways, less micromanagement.
I Contracted at the Air Force Army Exchange Service and did get about twice the pay of the staff for the same job. But they got health benefits second only to the US Congress, have a fantastic retirement plan that let them retire after 20 years at very close to their top pay with COLAs given regularly, got to park in the AAFES parking lot instead of scrambling through a rubble field near the building, got to use the onsite gym & other facilities that contractors could not visit, and had a sick leave policy that had many folks coming in when they felt like working. And if anything burbled, they had a union to go to bat for them while contractors were routinely sacrificed when a Peter Principal manager screwed up and needed someone to take the fall.
Contractors are a way for the government to save money because they don't have to pay out benefits.
The salary is just one factor of the cost of employment.
If the government hired all of these sub-contractors as employees, then they would all be members of various federal unions, and the government would then be on the hook for all those unions' juice benefit plans and pensions. Also they would be paying payroll tax for them all (yes the government has to pay tax too).
If all these costs were accounted for then the supposed gap would be much narrower or potentially even non-existent.
And when they talk about how much Federal employees make vs Contractors they never factor in that a Contractor doesn't get any benefits, any life insurance, any health insurance, or anything. The Contractor has to buy his or her own and receives none of the fancy government benefits. In reality the government employee might get less in take home pay, but they get way more in benefits.
What is not surprising at all but most entertaining, is that the CP kingpin says that many of the users of his sites are at the highest positions of government, the corporate world and the church. Including a quote about some Goldman Sachs exec who is willing to "hire some more thugs to bust up OWS" (anon seems to be aligning itself with OWS).
Also that the site allows payment in bitcoins.
If it allows payment in Bitcoin it's for the authorities to take down, not Anonymous. Anonymous does not have the expertise to do anything like that.
It's important to remember that just because Anonymous takes responsibility for something, it in no way means it's the same collective of individuals responsible for some other action under the name. That's both the advantage and disadvantage to using that umbrella to cover your actions. There was just a news story the other day of Anonymous hacking another police station. Can people find justification for that nearly as easily as shutting down child porn? What stops a judge from charging an individual with every crime ever done under the Anonymous name even if they were only personally responsible for a petty one? And let's not forget that parts of Anonymous are involved in child porn themselves, whether that's 5-year-old girls or "jailbait."
Anyway, the question though is how do police deal with this information, and how does a lawyer prevent it from being thrown out of court due to its questionable origin?
Well in this case Anonymous are acting as informants.
why aren't the law enforcement organizations of the world not taking out these known exploiters of children?
I can speculate a few options:
* They're infiltrating the websites to take down the actual producers instead of the 99% of leechers. * They're gathering hard evidence instead of taking it down immediately without being able to convict anyone, making the whole thing pointless (they can just set up a new website). * They don't have enough resources and are busy with other websites
But they don't know for sure these are the actual producers. Are they doing forensics on the images? Are they scanning for metadata? It's one thing if they had some success but they only have 1500 random names of suspected pedophiles.
Sure they are going after the producers and thats who we should go after but I don't think they actually have anything other than some random data that could belong to anybody they say it does.
What Anonymous does is wrong no matter who they are attacking. They are trying to gain support for their group by attacking something that is considered wrong by 99% of the people. Who appointed them to be the moral compass of the Internet? No one did!
On the other hand why aren't the law enforcement organizations of the world not taking out these known exploiters of children?
Because HiddenWiki isn't primarily focused on child porn. I don't know about the other darknet sites but HiddenWiki simply links you to every hidden service. If there is child porn hosted on the darknet Anonymous went about it in a dumb way.
They should leave the police work to the police and focus on stuff that they can solve. Trying to police the internet of pedophiles when they could only find 1500 should prove that it's a complete waste of time.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand your very well presented point. I'll focus on one bit, if you don't mind: "...someone lacking extensive training in biochemistry/virology would not be able to reproduce the virus from this work from the experimental section of the their paper."
The problem comes in when you have people are are extensively trained in biochemistry/virology who might be able to do something with the information under discussion.
Similarly, it's not beyond believe to think that the organizations (in Mexico for example) making meth might be able to take your research and do something with it, even if the home brewers couldn't.
But this information or discovery wasn't really new. It's something people who know virology already learned. It's only novel in that the details and virus studied but not in the methods.
If someone is extensively trained in biochemistry/virology we have an FBI to monitor them. Of course anyone trained can do a lot of damage, anyone educated can do a lot of damage, but that has always been the case.
Eco-terrorists might support population reduction but it wont work because some of the population will have the money to buy vaccines, masks, and simply wait it out while others wont.
All that will happen is certain groups will find a vaccine and make the virus innocuous to them. Others in poorer countries or less educated places will die. Not all that different from what happened with HIV.
And one form of terrorism is bioterrorism. That kind of population reduction would even the score.
And you're wrong in thinking this sort of virus cannot be controlled. A vaccine could actually make large portions of the population immune. The vaccine itself might not be perfect but it would result in preserving some populations.
There are two problems with your comparison. The first is that evidence suggests that Al Qaeda would be perfectly happy to exterminate the same populations that Hitler wished to exterminate (it is even its goal to exterminate several of them). The second is that Hitler would not have been interested in this virus because it would not have selectively targeted the populations he wished to exterminate. It would have also exterminated to the same degree the population that he wished to promulgate, especially considering that most of the populations he wished to exterminate were mixed in among the populations he wished to advance.
So Hitler would give the vaccine to the population he wanted to spare in advance and then spread the infection.
Hitler would have loved to have a flu that could completely exterminate certain populations. And many of his followers would love to create a flu like this and distribute it to certain countries and populations.
You're right it's dangerous and most nationalists wont want to use bioweapons but there are certain situations where it could and would be used even by nationalist governments.
We already know that police officers have no right to personal privacy on work owned communications equipment (smartphones or cellphones)
encryption is a method of privacy. Hence police communications cannot be encrypted.
I can understand the need for special units to use encrypted communication like SWAT. LAPD SWAT used LASH radios for years.
But there is simply no need to encrypt all police communications.
You have to wonder why this is happening and making news now. Would it be the Occupy movement?
Why not use a rolling window of encryption keys, and publish the keys after 24 hours or so? That way, criminals can't make use of real time updates on police status, but the police are still required to keep their asses clean on the radio?
That's still not a good enough compromise unless we get the same privacy from the police. The point is the police want to watch everyone for no reason or perhaps for political reasons, but they don't expect to be put under the same scrutiny as everybody else?
The police should be put under just as much scrutiny by the community as they put on the community. The police if they have to keep something secret should not be communicating it. The rare example is that a SWAT team might need to conduct an operation but honestly how rare is this?
If it has to be something serious let the FBI or the feds handle it. Why empower the local cop? If there is a terrorist problem let the feds solve it. Don't militarize the local cops in our neighborhoods and think it can lead to anything good because we all know once the laws change so that we are the new enemy or terrorist or criminal all that new technology will be turned on us.
This has nothing to do with safety, this is to mute the press. The press follows the scanner conversations to report on all accidents and incidents. With police hiding records and conversations due to lawsuits, we dont need more "hidden" police communications, we them open to keep them honest.
Its bad enough the PR for police is on TV, almost 1/2 of the line up are some cop based shows, perfect cops fighting evil criminals.
In reality, we have a growing movement in the US to keep police honest due to the mega lawsuits in almost every major city. I'm in Seattle, and the police abuse is way out of hand here. The internal coverups, the blue code of silence, the getting ride of whistle blowers, the incompetent police are costing this state with awards and settlements in the millions. Its also sad that the state budget hides these lawsuits. The most open lawsuit loses, department of transportation, they list every payout in our budget. We need that detail for police.
The same logic that the police applies to our community should be applied to the police. If you don't have something to hide and you aren't doing anything wrong why do you need encryption?
The police are going around pepper spraying protesters, and arresting people for possession of drugs but they want privacy and secrecy so they can more efficiently plot against ordinary non-violent Americans?
they are hiding their communications from the public, I guess they have things to hide.
This will be cracked, but of-course it will be declared illegal to brake these communications (and DMCA can be used for this).
Police are just the tools in the hands of the lawless corrupt governments that are used to force the population to obey the power.
Because if they are serving the public interest they shouldn't mind if the public sees what they do and how they work. What do they have to hide and why are they doing this now?
I see no reason why the community shouldn't watch the police. If the police aren't corrupt and aren't breaking the law or doing anything wrong why do they have to hide their communications?
There is a real argument that realtime police communications requires secrecy to protect police and their operations while they do the majority of their work that is indeed properly protecting the public.
But there is also a real argument that hiding those communications also hides lots of the minority of their work that at best doesn't protect the public, some of which severely harms the public.
These arguments don't conflict when the realtime parameter is removed. Both legitimate cop business and legitimate public protection are served if all these comms are published after some short delay. Like the following day, or perhaps even just a few hours later.
Publishing them also removes the advantage that some people have who can spend on equipment to monitor the comms. Instead any interested member of the public can check them. All of them, compared to audited logs of the activity on the cops comms equipment. The publication order has to have teeth, prosecuting people for obstructing justice when they're hiding cop comms they find inconvenient to reveal.
But if most arrests are for stupid stuff which most of the public doesn't believe is in the interest of protesting the public then the public has a good argument that the police should be watched and watched carefully. Yes there could be a serial killer or some violent criminal out there but why would the police need encrypted communication for something like that?
Also you have to understand that if the police have the right to privacy but you don't, the police can abuse this to scheme and plot operations against your community which may be entirely political in nature.
I am a member of the public and a criminal. I am against this. I need to know when and where the police are coming after me. I have rights, you know. information wants to be free!
Anyone who isn't a criminal can be made into a criminal at the stroke of a pen.
And, I don't mean getting busted by the graders. I mean, if you're not really learning the content, how do you get away with not understanding the fundamentals when you get to higher class levels. Seems like it would eventually catch up with you.
College is generally easy. The only reason to cheat would be to get into elite schools. It's not hard to cheat either if you're truly smart but it is hard to cheat and not get caught for the reason that cheating does take a bit of team work.
When the project is over, it is extremely easy to get another one. I used to be an overseas contractor for the DoD and after every contract (usually 1 year contracts), it was very easy to get another one if you didn't mind moving to another location. I ended up all over Asia in a span of 10 years doing that. They still had contracts left, but I ended my services with them because I moved to Europe and they didn't have much going on there at the time.
That depends on a lot of factors. Still if it weren't cheaper for them to pay contractors they would just hire employees. It's obviously cheaper.
The contracts never end. If it ever does, you did something wrong.
Obviously that isn't the case. Where do you get the idea that the contracts ever end?
Been working Federal IT at various agencies for 20 years and the story is the same today as it was twenty years ago. You can't reach high quality/niche programmers on the Federal pay scale in the DC area. Scoff if you want, but we just had a top notch contractor successfully apply and get an offer for Federal work, only to turn down $137K plus bens. Great candidate, couldn't reach his rate. I've seen this time and time again.
That same contractor bills out near $300K per annum.
The system is skewed towards the contracting companies. Keeping Federal IT pay rates down below the industry average for our area guarantees big pay days for the contracting companies. These companies were supposed to be a panacea for the inefficient Federal worker. All that they have become is YAFE (yet another Federal entitlement).
And yes, some of the contractors have been in the same position for DECADES. Same lifetime entitlement.
Where do you get the idea that a contractor is entitled? When the project is over the contractor is out of a job. So the overall cost of the contractor isn't as much as the employee who can't be fired and who gets all sorts of benefits.
He means that the non-outsourced non-contract employees are unions, and so hard to fire, that a contract one is "easier". But that "ease" doesn't seem to take wasting taxpayer money into account.
It's much more cost effective to get rid of all the benefits that government employees have considering that contractors receive no benefits and do exactly the same work. Those benefits are a waste of money right?
Then they should be subject to thrice as much scrutiny and thrice as many penalties.
But they aren't really paid twice as much. It's a myth that they are. If you are a contractor you get more cash, but yo ustill have to buy your health insurance, pay your own retirement, pay for all the benefits government employees take for granted.
The only reason to use Contractors are the tax benefits and the fact that it's just better in a lot of ways, less micromanagement.
I Contracted at the Air Force Army Exchange Service and did get about twice the pay of the staff for the same job. But they got health benefits second only to the US Congress, have a fantastic retirement plan that let them retire after 20 years at very close to their top pay with COLAs given regularly, got to park in the AAFES parking lot instead of scrambling through a rubble field near the building, got to use the onsite gym & other facilities that contractors could not visit, and had a sick leave policy that had many folks coming in when they felt like working. And if anything burbled, they had a union to go to bat for them while contractors were routinely sacrificed when a Peter Principal manager screwed up and needed someone to take the fall.
Contractors are a way for the government to save money because they don't have to pay out benefits.
The salary is just one factor of the cost of employment.
If the government hired all of these sub-contractors as employees, then they would all be members of various federal unions, and the government would then be on the hook for all those unions' juice benefit plans and pensions. Also they would be paying payroll tax for them all (yes the government has to pay tax too).
If all these costs were accounted for then the supposed gap would be much narrower or potentially even non-existent.
Contractors are actually CHEAPER.
And when they talk about how much Federal employees make vs Contractors they never factor in that a Contractor doesn't get any benefits, any life insurance, any health insurance, or anything. The Contractor has to buy his or her own and receives none of the fancy government benefits. In reality the government employee might get less in take home pay, but they get way more in benefits.
What is not surprising at all but most entertaining, is that the CP kingpin says that many of the users of his sites are at the highest positions of government, the corporate world and the church. Including a quote about some Goldman Sachs exec who is willing to "hire some more thugs to bust up OWS" (anon seems to be aligning itself with OWS).
Also that the site allows payment in bitcoins.
If it allows payment in Bitcoin it's for the authorities to take down, not Anonymous. Anonymous does not have the expertise to do anything like that.
It's important to remember that just because Anonymous takes responsibility for something, it in no way means it's the same collective of individuals responsible for some other action under the name. That's both the advantage and disadvantage to using that umbrella to cover your actions. There was just a news story the other day of Anonymous hacking another police station. Can people find justification for that nearly as easily as shutting down child porn? What stops a judge from charging an individual with every crime ever done under the Anonymous name even if they were only personally responsible for a petty one? And let's not forget that parts of Anonymous are involved in child porn themselves, whether that's 5-year-old girls or "jailbait."
Anyway, the question though is how do police deal with this information, and how does a lawyer prevent it from being thrown out of court due to its questionable origin?
Well in this case Anonymous are acting as informants.
why aren't the law enforcement organizations of the world not taking out these known exploiters of children?
I can speculate a few options:
* They're infiltrating the websites to take down the actual producers instead of the 99% of leechers.
* They're gathering hard evidence instead of taking it down immediately without being able to convict anyone, making the whole thing pointless (they can just set up a new website).
* They don't have enough resources and are busy with other websites
But they don't know for sure these are the actual producers. Are they doing forensics on the images? Are they scanning for metadata? It's one thing if they had some success but they only have 1500 random names of suspected pedophiles.
Sure they are going after the producers and thats who we should go after but I don't think they actually have anything other than some random data that could belong to anybody they say it does.
What Anonymous does is wrong no matter who they are attacking. They are trying to gain support for their group by attacking something that is considered wrong by 99% of the people. Who appointed them to be the moral compass of the Internet? No one did!
On the other hand why aren't the law enforcement organizations of the world not taking out these known exploiters of children?
Because HiddenWiki isn't primarily focused on child porn. I don't know about the other darknet sites but HiddenWiki simply links you to every hidden service. If there is child porn hosted on the darknet Anonymous went about it in a dumb way.
They should leave the police work to the police and focus on stuff that they can solve. Trying to police the internet of pedophiles when they could only find 1500 should prove that it's a complete waste of time.