Wouldn't that require him to literally murder somebody? Suge was never anonymous or unknown, he was "behind the scenes" only in the sense that he wasn't on stage... you never see Don King in a boxing match, either.
Anyway, I suspect that, had Julian Assange chosen to remain anonymous, he would have either been dead or "outed" months ago. The "decline" of WikiLeaks may be related, but only insofar as both are a result of it becoming well-known and popular in recent months.
Suge Knight never directly murdered anybody. Also Assange if they wanted him dead, would be dead. He went public because he wanted to go public, he may have been outed sure, but that doesn't excuse all the interviews.
It's not practical because everybody knows the government was going to target everyone running the wikileaks server all the way up the chain to Assange. They will treat Wikileaks like a terrorist or mafia type organization.
It's only a matter of time before the high and mighty types put him on the blacklist. I even heard that he lost control of his own server wikileaks.org, and that the technical difficulties are a result of an act of sabotage. I said it before and I'll say it again, it might be best for the future of wikileaks of Julian Assange steps down, he allowed himself to go public and accept all that media attention, he's the one who killed wikileaks.
There was a time when wikileaks would just dump any and all information onto the site and let us review it all. Lately it's all about the US government, and the wars. It's not the kind of information that most of us find interesting, and while they did a good job with many stories early on back before Julian Assange let it swell his head, now hes become public and he's pulled a Suge Knight, ruining what he created and destroying all the hard work and effort by becoming a celebrity.
You can either be powerful, or a celebrity, but it's not wise to try and be both. Julian Assange should have let someone else be the spokesperson. It should have been designed so that there was not one point of failure. Because Julian Assange is THAT GUY, the agencies will all target him and that will be the end of Wikileaks. Game over for wikileaks, it was a naive idea that could never have worked in practice and was doomed to be exploited by governments.
If it was Hoovers blackmailing rogue "evil" FBI, the same FBI that was doing cointel pro and using urban warfare tactics on the weathermen and black panthers, this is an FBI that could have easily incited this. They call them agent provocateurs. Their role is to incite violence.
I don't and will never trust an informant. And if it's an informant then did the informant do this because the FBI wanted to give the national guard the excuse to fire? It almost seems too convenient.
They're not voting, they are speaking. The Constitution is clear: anybody can speak, regardless of citizenship. There were no Constitutional considerations about voting before the Civil War, it was up to the states to decide for themselves who could vote. Outside of the overarching conditions set out in the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments the states still decide who can vote and who can't, and in some localities it is possible by law for non-citizens to vote.
It is clear by your ignorant, flat wrong assertions that you have neither the learning nor desire to learn that makes the furtherance of this exchange worth my time. If you would like a civics lesson I recommend you pay for it from an institution designed to render such services. In the meantime try to see that your insufficient grasp of US law, politics, and history do not unduly impede the work of the informed.
I never said it was illegal. I never said it wasn't a pattern through history. I said I disagreed with the path we are on. And I don't think foreign money can be considered equal speech when it's speech is worth more than my speech.
With voting every vote is of equal worth, with money not every amount of equal. Even you can figure something like this out.
You can't have it both ways, either the Constitution applies to foreigners and they get freedom of speech and due process, or it doesn't and they don't get freedom of speech or due process. That's the whole point of 'equal protection':
[...] nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
If you want the USA to be free and have a valid democratic process uncorrupted by foreign influence then you'd have to get all the best minds in the country to fight or challenge the best minds from other countries. If the best minds in our country only think about making money, and the best minds in China, Russia, Iran and other countries are all focused on taking over the USA in clandestine fashion, the result is going to be that the best minds in the USA are going to be corrupted by foreign nationals, foreign spys, foreign money from foreign corporations.
So the best hackers in the USA could be hacking for China trying to rig the US election. Or maybe Isreali hackers are better so their candidate wins the election, and so on and so forth. This has far reaching implications for the integrity of the Democratic process.
Then you have the foreign influence on politicians, on scientists working on nuclear and biological weapons, on professors who grade your science paper, on your classmate who keeps tabs on you. It all has far reaching implications and what you aren't considering is that the USA is currently bankrupt.
The bankrupt USA now does not have the money to fund itself. So now it has to rely on foreign money to fund itself. This reliance on foreign money along with the foreign corporations who now can spend as much as they want on elections, along with the willingness of foreign agents to break the law to rig or hack elections, and you have a country which can quite easily be completely taken over and overrun by a coalition of countries who could divide the US up amongst themselves.
And who would they be fighting over? They'd be fighting over the serfs, the servants, the consumers. You think your wages suck now? You think your quality of life sucks now? Wait until foreigners take this country, then you might find yourself laid off while foreigners take your job.
So you can compete with the foreign countries, or you can submit to them. What other choice is there?
Wow buddy you have your head straight up your ass don't you? Ok, so let's say we take all the geeks, fighters, number crunchers and thinkers nation wide, train them and deploy them in some fashion. Who are you going to fight? If all of the politicians are corrupt who is going to know on a world scale who is bad and who is good? Bomb everybody? That hasn't worked out well for anybody before, hack everybody? They'll just hack back. Start a war with the middle east? All the politicians now want to screw with them and if they are apparently not on the side of their own country then you are just serving "the spy". So where do you propose this great militia should go, who should they kill? Maybe with all of this propaganda going around you feel you need to kill someone but in reality you don't need to. As far as we know the whole 9/11 thing could have been a result of one diplomat making fun of anothers wifes dress. How much do you hear when they talk face to face? Maybe they golf and laugh about all this shit behind closed doors. But somehow you want one group of people to attack another group of people because of politicians who are talking shit in the ears of both sides?
If you want your freedom you have to be willing to fight for it.
Enjoy being ruled by foreign corporations, it's the position you deserve.
The simple fact is that the US government is too big because the US itself is too big. If you want an efficient government you want a sovereign polis. Aristotle knew it, Machiavelli knew it, but the economic and military concerns have overridden any concern for a pure abstract efficient state. The state does not exist in a vacuum.
The only way to 'fix' the federal government would be to either fundamentally change it, say by imposing limits on the number of bills that could be written/sponsored in a session, or by completely dissolving it and letting the states become sovereign again (which are microcosms of the federal problem so that only partially ameliorates).
The problem is not that the US government is too big, the problem is the US government is neither efficient or effective. To be effective would mean foreign influence would be kept out of the democratic process. Do we really want foreigners writing the laws that govern us as Americans?
To be effective would also mean limiting the influence of corporations on government while increasing the influence of unions. This would give the worker(citizen) a voice, even if it's limited by the corrupt union boss it's still more of a voice than they have now.
Efficient would be to run the government in a way which is both cost effective and which meets objectives. If liberty is the objective of government, this government is not doing it's job effectively or efficiently.
If the government is trying to drive us into serfdom then they are accomplishing that mission very efficiently.
No...if my only choices were "a guy who beat his wife" and "a guy who talks about another guy that beat his wife", I just wouldn't vote.
We have the freedom to CHOOSE to vote in America, not just the freedom TO vote. Not voting is a freedom some people in this world do not have, just as voting is a freedom some people in this world do not have.
If the vote isn't counted, and doesn't matter, what difference does it make?
Or if the vote is counted but lobbyists write and push through all the laws, what difference does it make?
And since there wont be any tougher laws on lobbyists what can you expect?
Because the money comes from and is owned by the foreigners and foreign nationals.
So they write the policies, they write the laws, they basically run DC with AIPAC and other lobbyist groups like them. Don't be surprised when China, Isreal, Russia and many other powerful nations actually use their money as speech to determine our future.
~10000 bills are introduced in Congress every year. Do you think a human being can read 10000 bills back to front in less than a year? Especially now when some bills are more than a thousand pages long? While at the same time drafting their own bills, listening to constituents, meeting with colleagues, staff, committees? Ludicrous.
Does it suck? Yes, but the only way to fix it is to impose a limit on the number of bills that can be introduced, which would naturally have a dramatic impact on how responsive the legislature could be (and it's already slow). That would necessitate a more powerful executive to take up the slack. Is that what you want? A paralyzed legislative branch and a tyrant?
I don't like it anymore than the next guy, but I'm not so simple minded that I think you can hand wave it away as "they're just not doing their jobs".
Then maybe they shouldn't be introducing 1000 bills 1000 pages each that they didn't write.
"Terrorism" does work sometimes. It got the Soviets out of Afghanistan and the French out of Algeria, to name but two. In fact many if not most revolutions contain a 'terrorist' component, but that label just happens to vanish if the revolution succeeds and consequently rewrites the history books making the deaths of innocents into political martyrs (which in Algeria especially was really the case, as the French orchestrated false flag terrorist attacks to undermine popular support for the local insurgency).
As for the rest, your post is tin foil hat nonsense. The President does not normally write laws (and any which he might would still have to be sponsored from committee to floor by a congressman), that's what executive orders are for. Further, congressmen, The President, cabinet members, etc. are all too busy to read most laws. That's not a secret. That's why they have a staff. Their staff researches proposed legislation, writes it, reads it, rewrites it, re-researches it, etc. and only briefs their superiors on key points. It's not a grand conspiracy, it's a simple adaptation to circumstances. There are too many bills which are too long for every congressman to read every one. Hell, many of the never make it out of committee, let alone pass a floor vote or actually get signed.
Oh but of course it's the evil, evil corporations who control everything! That's why the government was so unsuccessful at breaking up AT&T in the 80s... oh wait, it wasn't. Corporate interests are no less valid than the interests of an other institutions or individuals. They are a significant part of the economy and consequently the politics of that economy. I'm sick of all the anti-corporatism for anti-corporatism's sake. Everybody wants to ride the wagon and spit at it too.
We are tired of your excuses. You always have excuses fo why congress does not read or write it's own laws. You'll have excuses for why so many lobbyists like AIPAC are writing laws and influencing government. You'll have excuses for why corporations should be able to spend obscene amounts of money bribing and corrupting the political process.
And of course you say the voting machines being hacked is tin foil. You wont provide any solutions either because you don't want the situation to be solved.
Real democracy will only come when we apply the principles of free software [metagovernment.org] to government.
You don't live somewhere with a Home Owners Association, do you? Getting people to participate is nearly impossible even when it results in there being a lot of money levied on them. People would rather do other things. They hardly get out to vote.
And you actually think something like Metagovernment will work?!? Talk about a pipe dream!
What good is voting if the machine runs windows XP and is hacked in such a way that your vote wont be counted?
1. It doesn't work. 2. It's a declaration of war against the US military establishment.
Now that these facts are clear, we can ask ourselves some serious questions. Why would a government need to fork? If you look at the system you'll see the problem with government is that the US government has too many enemies. Basically the entire world against the US government. Because of this there are foreign spy agencies seeking to control the US government by controlling congress. These foreign spy agencies now have the ability to use corporations to take control of the US government from the American citizen (the worker).
The result is the citizen/worker does not make their own laws. The political families are just families of corrupted puppets serving whoever bribes them or blackmails them the most. There appears to be no one in complete control and if someone is in complete control I have no idea who that is. Obama is in control on paper but he does not write the laws nor does he read them. Neither do any of the political faces, they merely sign what they are told to sign and the whole thing is part of a ritual.
This is why the current laws being passed suck. That being said there is only one solution that I can see, and that is the militarization of the US society. This would mean we'd need cyber warriors, and the idea that geeks can't be warriors must go. The idea that anybody in any profession cannot be trained to fight for the US interest must go. You can't expect your laws to get better if you aren't free. You can't expect to make more money if you don't control the money, or anything for that matter. And you can't expect jobs if you don't control anything.
Once again, politics aren't the answer. Patriotism might not be the answer either. The answer is to improve cyber security, this way it's far more difficult to steal an election by hacking voting machines. This should be your political stance, not democrat or republican. The security of the democratic process should be the only political stance that matters.
Politicians have the illusion of power by signature. The real power are the intelligence agencies that bribe and blackmail politicians into doing their bidding. The real power are the corporations funding the lobbyists who do the bribery, or in some cases the journalists and private investigators who do the blackmail, so lets face it every politician basically reads their script and is like a celebrity.
They go on TV and read a teleprompter. They sign what they are told to sign. Their controllers write their bills, the politicians don't read anything and just sign off on whatever their controllers make them sign off too. Since the average American citizen isn't in control of anything, the foreign national has more control over the political process than the average American citizen, whether it be hacking the voting machine or bribing the politician.
At least if there are cyber warriors the voting machines wont have to be hacked.
And the Russians, and Iran, and possibly Al Qaeda and a lot of "domestic terrorist" groups like the ALF. Homeland security produced a report which was leaked on Wikileaks detailing who the targets are.
If somebody is a politically motivated cyber terrorists, the law isn't going to make a difference as they aren't the kind of person who would respect the law to begin with.
So those laws would mainly affect us and leave them free to hack us and do anything to us basically. The only real solution is for spy agencies and military to train it's own group of cyber warriors or whatever we want to call these people to conduct cyber warfare. This combined with the current laws should be enough.
The law usually creates as many problems as it solves.
It's a war. This is not new. Just look at whats going on with Cryptome being hacked in the name of Bradley Manning. I would say ideology is a strong motivator for hacking.
Slashdot Mirror
"he's pulled a Suge Knight"
Wouldn't that require him to literally murder somebody? Suge was never anonymous or unknown, he was "behind the scenes" only in the sense that he wasn't on stage... you never see Don King in a boxing match, either.
Anyway, I suspect that, had Julian Assange chosen to remain anonymous, he would have either been dead or "outed" months ago. The "decline" of WikiLeaks may be related, but only insofar as both are a result of it becoming well-known and popular in recent months.
Suge Knight never directly murdered anybody. Also Assange if they wanted him dead, would be dead. He went public because he wanted to go public, he may have been outed sure, but that doesn't excuse all the interviews.
It's not practical because everybody knows the government was going to target everyone running the wikileaks server all the way up the chain to Assange. They will treat Wikileaks like a terrorist or mafia type organization.
It's only a matter of time before the high and mighty types put him on the blacklist.
I even heard that he lost control of his own server wikileaks.org, and that the technical difficulties are a result of an act of sabotage. I said it before and I'll say it again, it might be best for the future of wikileaks of Julian Assange steps down, he allowed himself to go public and accept all that media attention, he's the one who killed wikileaks.
There was a time when wikileaks would just dump any and all information onto the site and let us review it all. Lately it's all about the US government, and the wars. It's not the kind of information that most of us find interesting, and while they did a good job with many stories early on back before Julian Assange let it swell his head, now hes become public and he's pulled a Suge Knight, ruining what he created and destroying all the hard work and effort by becoming a celebrity.
You can either be powerful, or a celebrity, but it's not wise to try and be both. Julian Assange should have let someone else be the spokesperson. It should have been designed so that there was not one point of failure. Because Julian Assange is THAT GUY, the agencies will all target him and that will be the end of Wikileaks. Game over for wikileaks, it was a naive idea that could never have worked in practice and was doomed to be exploited by governments.
Which is it?
If it was Hoovers blackmailing rogue "evil" FBI, the same FBI that was doing cointel pro and using urban warfare tactics on the weathermen and black panthers, this is an FBI that could have easily incited this. They call them agent provocateurs. Their role is to incite violence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVNu9XWQob4
I don't and will never trust an informant. And if it's an informant then did the informant do this because the FBI wanted to give the national guard the excuse to fire? It almost seems too convenient.
They're not voting, they are speaking. The Constitution is clear: anybody can speak, regardless of citizenship. There were no Constitutional considerations about voting before the Civil War, it was up to the states to decide for themselves who could vote. Outside of the overarching conditions set out in the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments the states still decide who can vote and who can't, and in some localities it is possible by law for non-citizens to vote.
It is clear by your ignorant, flat wrong assertions that you have neither the learning nor desire to learn that makes the furtherance of this exchange worth my time. If you would like a civics lesson I recommend you pay for it from an institution designed to render such services. In the meantime try to see that your insufficient grasp of US law, politics, and history do not unduly impede the work of the informed.
I never said it was illegal. I never said it wasn't a pattern through history. I said I disagreed with the path we are on. And I don't think foreign money can be considered equal speech when it's speech is worth more than my speech.
With voting every vote is of equal worth, with money not every amount of equal. Even you can figure something like this out.
You can't have it both ways, either the Constitution applies to foreigners and they get freedom of speech and due process, or it doesn't and they don't get freedom of speech or due process. That's the whole point of 'equal protection':
[...] nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
14th Amendment, weasel out of that one douchebag.
Foreigners don't get to vote and shouldn't.
So you're saying the Constitution doesn't apply to foreigners eh? Glad we can agree that illegal immigrants have no right to due process. Cool.
I wasn't talking about illegal immigrants. Nice try.
If you want the USA to be free and have a valid democratic process uncorrupted by foreign influence then you'd have to get all the best minds in the country to fight or challenge the best minds from other countries. If the best minds in our country only think about making money, and the best minds in China, Russia, Iran and other countries are all focused on taking over the USA in clandestine fashion, the result is going to be that the best minds in the USA are going to be corrupted by foreign nationals, foreign spys, foreign money from foreign corporations.
So the best hackers in the USA could be hacking for China trying to rig the US election. Or maybe Isreali hackers are better so their candidate wins the election, and so on and so forth. This has far reaching implications for the integrity of the Democratic process.
Then you have the foreign influence on politicians, on scientists working on nuclear and biological weapons, on professors who grade your science paper, on your classmate who keeps tabs on you. It all has far reaching implications and what you aren't considering is that the USA is currently bankrupt.
The bankrupt USA now does not have the money to fund itself. So now it has to rely on foreign money to fund itself. This reliance on foreign money along with the foreign corporations who now can spend as much as they want on elections, along with the willingness of foreign agents to break the law to rig or hack elections, and you have a country which can quite easily be completely taken over and overrun by a coalition of countries who could divide the US up amongst themselves.
And who would they be fighting over? They'd be fighting over the serfs, the servants, the consumers. You think your wages suck now? You think your quality of life sucks now? Wait until foreigners take this country, then you might find yourself laid off while foreigners take your job.
So you can compete with the foreign countries, or you can submit to them. What other choice is there?
Wow buddy you have your head straight up your ass don't you? Ok, so let's say we take all the geeks, fighters, number crunchers and thinkers nation wide, train them and deploy them in some fashion. Who are you going to fight? If all of the politicians are corrupt who is going to know on a world scale who is bad and who is good? Bomb everybody? That hasn't worked out well for anybody before, hack everybody? They'll just hack back. Start a war with the middle east? All the politicians now want to screw with them and if they are apparently not on the side of their own country then you are just serving "the spy". So where do you propose this great militia should go, who should they kill? Maybe with all of this propaganda going around you feel you need to kill someone but in reality you don't need to. As far as we know the whole 9/11 thing could have been a result of one diplomat making fun of anothers wifes dress. How much do you hear when they talk face to face? Maybe they golf and laugh about all this shit behind closed doors. But somehow you want one group of people to attack another group of people because of politicians who are talking shit in the ears of both sides?
If you want your freedom you have to be willing to fight for it.
Enjoy being ruled by foreign corporations, it's the position you deserve.
The simple fact is that the US government is too big because the US itself is too big. If you want an efficient government you want a sovereign polis. Aristotle knew it, Machiavelli knew it, but the economic and military concerns have overridden any concern for a pure abstract efficient state. The state does not exist in a vacuum.
The only way to 'fix' the federal government would be to either fundamentally change it, say by imposing limits on the number of bills that could be written/sponsored in a session, or by completely dissolving it and letting the states become sovereign again (which are microcosms of the federal problem so that only partially ameliorates).
The problem is not that the US government is too big, the problem is the US government is neither efficient or effective. To be effective would mean foreign influence would be kept out of the democratic process. Do we really want foreigners writing the laws that govern us as Americans?
To be effective would also mean limiting the influence of corporations on government while increasing the influence of unions. This would give the worker(citizen) a voice, even if it's limited by the corrupt union boss it's still more of a voice than they have now.
Efficient would be to run the government in a way which is both cost effective and which meets objectives. If liberty is the objective of government, this government is not doing it's job effectively or efficiently.
If the government is trying to drive us into serfdom then they are accomplishing that mission very efficiently.
No...if my only choices were "a guy who beat his wife" and "a guy who talks about another guy that beat his wife", I just wouldn't vote.
We have the freedom to CHOOSE to vote in America, not just the freedom TO vote. Not voting is a freedom some people in this world do not have, just as voting is a freedom some people in this world do not have.
If the vote isn't counted, and doesn't matter, what difference does it make?
Or if the vote is counted but lobbyists write and push through all the laws, what difference does it make?
And since there wont be any tougher laws on lobbyists what can you expect?
Because the money comes from and is owned by the foreigners and foreign nationals.
So they write the policies, they write the laws, they basically run DC with AIPAC and other lobbyist groups like them. Don't be surprised when China, Isreal, Russia and many other powerful nations actually use their money as speech to determine our future.
~10000 bills are introduced in Congress every year. Do you think a human being can read 10000 bills back to front in less than a year? Especially now when some bills are more than a thousand pages long? While at the same time drafting their own bills, listening to constituents, meeting with colleagues, staff, committees? Ludicrous.
Does it suck? Yes, but the only way to fix it is to impose a limit on the number of bills that can be introduced, which would naturally have a dramatic impact on how responsive the legislature could be (and it's already slow). That would necessitate a more powerful executive to take up the slack. Is that what you want? A paralyzed legislative branch and a tyrant?
I don't like it anymore than the next guy, but I'm not so simple minded that I think you can hand wave it away as "they're just not doing their jobs".
Then maybe they shouldn't be introducing 1000 bills 1000 pages each that they didn't write.
If you don't believe in Democracy just say so.
"Terrorism" does work sometimes. It got the Soviets out of Afghanistan and the French out of Algeria, to name but two. In fact many if not most revolutions contain a 'terrorist' component, but that label just happens to vanish if the revolution succeeds and consequently rewrites the history books making the deaths of innocents into political martyrs (which in Algeria especially was really the case, as the French orchestrated false flag terrorist attacks to undermine popular support for the local insurgency).
As for the rest, your post is tin foil hat nonsense. The President does not normally write laws (and any which he might would still have to be sponsored from committee to floor by a congressman), that's what executive orders are for. Further, congressmen, The President, cabinet members, etc. are all too busy to read most laws. That's not a secret. That's why they have a staff. Their staff researches proposed legislation, writes it, reads it, rewrites it, re-researches it, etc. and only briefs their superiors on key points. It's not a grand conspiracy, it's a simple adaptation to circumstances. There are too many bills which are too long for every congressman to read every one. Hell, many of the never make it out of committee, let alone pass a floor vote or actually get signed.
Oh but of course it's the evil, evil corporations who control everything! That's why the government was so unsuccessful at breaking up AT&T in the 80s... oh wait, it wasn't. Corporate interests are no less valid than the interests of an other institutions or individuals. They are a significant part of the economy and consequently the politics of that economy. I'm sick of all the anti-corporatism for anti-corporatism's sake. Everybody wants to ride the wagon and spit at it too.
We are tired of your excuses. You always have excuses fo why congress does not read or write it's own laws. You'll have excuses for why so many lobbyists like AIPAC are writing laws and influencing government. You'll have excuses for why corporations should be able to spend obscene amounts of money bribing and corrupting the political process.
And of course you say the voting machines being hacked is tin foil. You wont provide any solutions either because you don't want the situation to be solved.
How much are they paying you Mr. Man?
Real democracy will only come when we apply the principles of free software [metagovernment.org] to government.
You don't live somewhere with a Home Owners Association, do you? Getting people to participate is nearly impossible even when it results in there being a lot of money levied on them. People would rather do other things. They hardly get out to vote.
And you actually think something like Metagovernment will work?!? Talk about a pipe dream!
What good is voting if the machine runs windows XP and is hacked in such a way that your vote wont be counted?
Tell that to the Dept of homeland security.
1. It doesn't work.
2. It's a declaration of war against the US military establishment.
Now that these facts are clear, we can ask ourselves some serious questions. Why would a government need to fork? If you look at the system you'll see the problem with government is that the US government has too many enemies. Basically the entire world against the US government. Because of this there are foreign spy agencies seeking to control the US government by controlling congress. These foreign spy agencies now have the ability to use corporations to take control of the US government from the American citizen (the worker).
The result is the citizen/worker does not make their own laws. The political families are just families of corrupted puppets serving whoever bribes them or blackmails them the most. There appears to be no one in complete control and if someone is in complete control I have no idea who that is. Obama is in control on paper but he does not write the laws nor does he read them. Neither do any of the political faces, they merely sign what they are told to sign and the whole thing is part of a ritual.
This is why the current laws being passed suck. That being said there is only one solution that I can see, and that is the militarization of the US society. This would mean we'd need cyber warriors, and the idea that geeks can't be warriors must go. The idea that anybody in any profession cannot be trained to fight for the US interest must go. You can't expect your laws to get better if you aren't free. You can't expect to make more money if you don't control the money, or anything for that matter. And you can't expect jobs if you don't control anything.
Once again, politics aren't the answer. Patriotism might not be the answer either. The answer is to improve cyber security, this way it's far more difficult to steal an election by hacking voting machines. This should be your political stance, not democrat or republican. The security of the democratic process should be the only political stance that matters.
Politicians have the illusion of power by signature. The real power are the intelligence agencies that bribe and blackmail politicians into doing their bidding. The real power are the corporations funding the lobbyists who do the bribery, or in some cases the journalists and private investigators who do the blackmail, so lets face it every politician basically reads their script and is like a celebrity.
They go on TV and read a teleprompter. They sign what they are told to sign. Their controllers write their bills, the politicians don't read anything and just sign off on whatever their controllers make them sign off too. Since the average American citizen isn't in control of anything, the foreign national has more control over the political process than the average American citizen, whether it be hacking the voting machine or bribing the politician.
At least if there are cyber warriors the voting machines wont have to be hacked.
And the Russians, and Iran, and possibly Al Qaeda and a lot of "domestic terrorist" groups like the ALF. Homeland security produced a report which was leaked on Wikileaks detailing who the targets are.
If somebody is a politically motivated cyber terrorists, the law isn't going to make a difference as they aren't the kind of person who would respect the law to begin with.
So those laws would mainly affect us and leave them free to hack us and do anything to us basically. The only real solution is for spy agencies and military to train it's own group of cyber warriors or whatever we want to call these people to conduct cyber warfare. This combined with the current laws should be enough.
The law usually creates as many problems as it solves.
It's a war. This is not new. Just look at whats going on with Cryptome being hacked in the name of Bradley Manning. I would say ideology is a strong motivator for hacking.
Who would have guessed? This isn't a surprise at all.
If the government wants to shut down a site they can probably do it. They'll just have one of their assets at earthlink or whereever handle it.