When the stations first started with the 'bug', the logo was generally transparent, small, inobtrusive, and only on-screen first the first few seconds after the commercial break.
Over time, the logos grew larger, more opaque, staying on-screen 100% of the time, and lately I've been seeing more and more animated logos. They're getting to be as obnoxious as banner ads.
Secure Computing offers
SafeWord, a token based authentication server which runs on Linux RedHat v6.1 (and numerous closed-source OSes).
This product is considerably less expensive than SecurID. I spent several weeks testing the product last fall, and found no major security issues with their algorithm nor with the server software, just some minor unix permissions issues with the software installation process itself.
CryptoCard's challenge-response mechanism is Digital Pathway's old 'SecureNetKey' algorithm, aka SNK-004.
A free implementation of the SNK routines can be found in the open source
Firewall Tool Kit.
There are several hardware and software implementations of SNK-004 available. Aside from Cryptocard, Safeword and Axent both offer hardware tokens which have a SNK mode.
In my experience, Cisco is "the" router vendor in most large shops. Cisco does take an interest in security, and has primitive support for SSH on a number of their network product platforms.
Aside from the problem of default and backdoor passwords, there are huge numbers of devices deployed with SNMP enabled and configured with RO/RW community strings as public/private.
Any day now some crew will start distributing 'rootkit' firmware versions of IOS with zombie functionality in the binary.
When there is a critical security hole in IOS, Cisco has been very good about releasing IOS revisions with the fix even to customers without any Cisco service contract.
Specifically, people have been wrongfully denied for political reasons, the records that the law requires to be destroyed are being held indefinitely, and NICS mysteriously goes down on the biggest gun show weekends of the year.
Even though the law was passed with what were thought was adequate safegaurds, it has taken years and extensive effort to change the recordkeeping activities of the FBI:
Final Rules Aim to Protect Information From Brady
Background Checks
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently issued a final rule to ensure the privacy of information collected under background checks for purchasing firearms, as required by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.
The Brady law created a National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) to conduct presale checks on potential handgun purchasers to determine if the buyer is legally able to purchase the gun. The act aims to prevent gun violence resulting from unlawful firearm transfers.
A provision of the Brady law gives the FBI the authority to audit the use and operation of NICS and to destroy NICS records to prevent the establishment of a national firearms registry. In a proposed rule published in March 1999, the FBI proposed to retain information in the NICS audit log on background checks for 90 days, down from an earlier proposed 18 months and the current six
months. More than 150 comments were received in response to the proposed rule, including many objections to any retention period at all as constituting a firearms registry in violation of the Brady law.
Reiterating their previous arguments, FBI officials, however, said they are not creating a firearms registry but must establish an adequate system of oversight and review, which requires that information be available for review for at least a short period of time.
The original post was praising the German system. My response was in response to that praise.
As to the 'racist' accusations, what makes you think I have not traveled to Germany? That I haven't seen their police and ID checks with my own eyes? That I am not myself of German ethnicity?
You must register with the local police where you live, update your registration when you move, show your papers whenever requested, and can be fined or arrested for not having your ID. That is the system that the original post was praising.
"
How about modding something a flamebait correctly for once?"
You have a point, but so did my message, thus my message was not flamebait.
Actually, one person wasted their modpoint by modding the post down as 'flamebait' where they would have been better served by modding your comment up.
The situation friday2k describes sure sounds like a police state to me: (emphasis mine)
"
In my homecountry, Germany, you have to register with the city you live in, tell them where you live and, if you move, unregister with your old city and register in the new one.
They can always track you. You have to have an ID card. It carries your address, height, weight, place of birth and your picture. If
you move within the country (see above) you have to have it updated. True, it does not carry your fingerprint, but it has a nice little
code that gets scanned when you travel by airplane, etc. It is compatible with the electronic readers at immigration that you guys
might be familiar with. And I even think there is a fine if you do not carry it with you. So how is the proposed ID card so much
different? I personally would like it if people have to register in a more thorough way if they travel with me on an airplane. Please
do not get me wrong, systems can be abused and there are enough examples of that, but I do not see that coming with a national
ID card system.
"
"
You do not present your ID when you buy something"
Not yet. As AT&T used to say, "You will".
"
We still have to wait and see what purpose the national ID system is supposed to serve."
This is a dangerous approach to take. If we actually need a 'National ID system' to solve a specific problem (many Americans are unconvinced) then it should be designed and implemented in such a way as to solve the problem at hand, with inherent safeguards to prevent abuse, now or in the future.
If we build a system that has the potential to be abused by individuals, by corporations, or by the state, then it will be abused.
"
Flying on an airplane, living in a city, if these things become illegal you have a problem in
general."
As little trust I have in our current government, I have even less reason to trust in a future administration's response to future threats.
Because unlike Deutschland, Americans are supposed to be free,
not living in a police state where any petty official may demand "Zeigen Sie Ihre Papiere, Kameraden!".
Yes, systems can be abused,and in the long run, all systems will be abused. If we create the necessary infrastructure for the government and corporations to track us today, they may not use it for less noble purposes now. But under a more conservative administration, after a more distressing terrorist event, they will use the database we build today to empower the big brother of tomorrow.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin
One of the issues that comes up often in discussing firearms purchase controls, is how to provide a mechanism to deny access by prohibited persons, without inherently building a database of all the lawful purchases and purchasers?
The basic premise of 'National ID' systems is that if we build a database of all law-abiding trustworthy citizens, anybody who does not exist in this database must be a 'prohibited person'.
This premise is also one of the biggest dangers of a national ID, and the primary objection raised by civil libertarians and the ultra paranoid.
The 'Brady Bill' background check law was written with a safeguard- all records of 'successful' checks were to be deleted. In reality, the Clinton administration ignored this limitation, holding records indefinitely.
The same sort of behavior can be expected regarding any safeguards built into a 'National ID' system.
It appears to me that the original question is regarding testing security of an application for which you or your client have a legitimate license to use, or a full beta/demo installation. That is, testing software by executing it on your own hardware.
This may violate the EULA or 'shrinkwrap contract' for the software, but is not generally a criminal act.
When you find a flaw in an application, contacting the vendor regarding the bug is a good idea. Asking them for compensation is a bad idea, and if it is phrased in any way that could possibly be construed as blackmail, could be a criminal act.
IANAL, but I do find, report, and publicize security holes in software.
This discussion reminds me of an interesting proposal I ran into back in college, that was actually strongly supported by the 'radical feminists' on campus:
Rather than attempting to control/limit/ban porn, a more effective approach would be to remove all copyright protection from all forms of pornography, thus eliminating the profit motive, thus destroying the market for commercial porn and ending the 'exploitation' of wymyn'
>
At the time I found the idea appealing for other reasons (free porn!), but there are other, more noble, positive aspects.
Nimda is a tough worm to keep out of a network!
on
Nimda To Strike Again
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Unlike 'Code Red', Nimda does not spread by pushing the worm binary in the HTTP request. The worm uses HTTP to find a vulnerable IIS server, then causes the IIS server to make a TFTP request out to the attacking host to retrieve the ~64K binary.
Most normal 'secure firewall' products aren't tuned to block outbound requests from the protected servers to internet hosts. Mine are, but that only gave me about 72 hours of lead time before it came in another way...
Even when firewalls block the IIS scanning, Nimda spreads by email, file shares, and by putting a copy of 'README.EXE' in the root of the IIS server and adding Javascript to all web pages on the server, pushing the worm at users of the infected web site server.
My firewalls block _all_ UDP packets, but my network still got hit hard, and probably incurred more like $60K in 'paper losses' -- lost productivity, bandwidth, overtime, etc.
We haven't found 'patient zero', but we have two good suspects, in both cases a user with a laptop that did not have updated anti-virus software and that got infected from one of these routes:
User took the laptop home and connected to an infected network/file shares.
User accessed 'hotmail' or a similar site and downloaded an attachment.
User visited an infected web site (probably at home) and ran README.EXE when prompted.
The common thread here is user error.
The best firewall is no protection against malicious, or just plain ignorant, users. Blame also falls on local admins for failing to push virus signature updates and keep up with system patches.
I've only ever seen around a dozen inside hosts from which the work was actively scanning HTTP, but the worm traffic from those dozen machines alone was enough to severely degrade WAN and firewall performance.
Dr. Houk uses motor vehicle regulation as an example for firearms,
noting they aren't banned, but that there are regulations and
licensing, cars and highways are made safer, driver behavior is
strictly regulated and enforced, and, as a result, we now save 25,000
lives relative to 1980 and even greater "when compared with three
decades ago when we had about 380,000 deaths per year." (It is
unclear what Dr. Houk has been ingesting, since the total number of
motor vehicle deaths peaked at about 56,000, and the number per
100-million vehicle miles has been declining fairly steadily for the
past decade, unsteadily in the '70s, and was stable in the '60s, so
the rate has been cut in half since 1960 -- a bit less than the rate
of accidental firearms fatalities. That is, of course, comparing rate
per 100,000 population to rate per 100,000,000 motor-vehicle miles.
Doing both on a rate per 100,000 population, with strict regulation,
improved cars and highways, lowered speed limits, and registration and
licensing, the motor vehicle accidental death rate fell about 12%
between 1960 and 1990, while the accidental death rate from firearms
fell almost 150%.)
Re:Try to always have six months pay saved up
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 2
Six months of pre-tax income?
Of post-tax pay?
Or six months of basic living expenses?
(If your income and your monthly expenses are just about equal, then you're making a big mistake!)
As a hedge against unemployment or other unforseen disaster, having sufficient liquid assets to pay your bills and buy groceries for six months, without having to sell off your stocks, cash in your IRA, or liquidate your CD's (the flat round shiny kind) is a smart idea.
Keeping six months of after-tax income in cash or cash equivalent is unrealistic. For most people, if they have that kind of money laying around today, it's allocated for the down-payment on a house.
A lot of the small-scale drug dealers in Chicago deal in food stamps and outright barter, with cash being the majority of their business.
I'm sure that if U.S. dollars were eliminated as legal tender, the drug dealers would find some other easily-transported and untraceable medium of exchange.
Just because they are criminals, does not automatically mean they are stupid.
It's not so much that we don't trust cash, but that the authorities have taught us not to trust people who deal in large sums of cash. Consider the Federal banking regulations requirements for reporting not just of cash transactions of $10,000 or more, but also of 'structuring' of transactions so as not to invoke the reporting laws.
There have also been reports of government pressure on car dealers and other dealers in high-priced symbols of wealth to strongly discourage them from accepting cash.
On a related note:
I tried to convince the car dealer to accept my VISA card when purchasing a new car (I get 2% cash back), and they wouldn't go for it. I had to bring in a cashier's check.
Blaming the legal owners and users of strong crypto, firearms, etc is based on the presumption that legal users are irresponsible, and that the owner's lax control is a direct cause of later criminal misuse. This is akin to saying that Phil was irresponsible for publishing that makes crypto easy to use, and making the application easily available leaves him responsible for criminal misuse of the same, often years later.
As far as firearms deaths, there is no 'large number of accidental deaths' that occur each year. The accidental firearms death rate in the USA decreases every year, between 1960 and 1990 the accidental death rate from firearms
fell almost 150%. In 1998, we had 866 'accidental' firearms deaths, this number is considered to be artificially inflated by mis-classified suicides.
Also, 'if all legal owners of guns are
registered', then within a decade or so, those same registration lists will be used to implement bans and confiscation.
Sounds like unrealistic paranoia?
Consider this: Every single US city or state that has firearms registration laws has, within two decades, used those same laws to implement a 'freeze' on ownership, bans on types of weapons, or outright confiscation. Every single time.
Do we expect anything different from crypto registration?
My group at work (at a Fortune-500 firm) recently 'inheirited' a set of those funky mesh chairs (Aeron), and I have to admit, they are nice, durable, comfortable chairs. Perhaps not worth $600+, but still very nice.
You're right in that the fancy chairs, quirky offices, and freebies were simply symptoms of the disease that killed dotcoms, but America is all about treating the symptoms.
But there's no way I am giving up my funky mesh chair.
Yeah sure, it's possible to live on a lower income, but chances are that if you are currently making $60K+ working for a non-fun employer, you won't find consistent work that is fun and pays half as much. I've been self-employed, and it has it's downside just as much as working 9-5 does.
I don't like to cook, I don't have any interest in eco-anything, and I like buying the latest/fastest/strongest hardware.
Remember, there's no shame in being filthy rich.
No law that you must make your comm interceptable!
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 2
With public-key encryption, they can still get a warrant and search your house for your private key.
With a One-Time-Pad, you destroy each sheet as you use it, so they can get a warrant and search your house, but you've already burned the relevant page from the pad and the worksheet and mixed the ashes in with your last BM.
The bottom line is this: Just because they have a warrant, doesn't mean you should be forced to make it easy for them to decrypt your message.
With current wiretap orders they can tap your phone, but if you use a voice scrambler, there's nothing illegal about that, even though it makes their wiretap order worthless.
Do we really want to create laws so the government can easily find people who have "something to hide", and prosecute them not for any specific crime, but for the crime of not revealing their communications to the government?
The article, and most every serious proposal for this type of application, including the 'Clipper chip' specifically suggest "key escrow" as a solution.
IOW, you do not have a "special police key that the data also is encrypted to, but rather, for every key you generate, you generate a second key and hand it to a trusted third party.
In theory, the government would need to obtain a search warrant or 'digital wiretap order' and present this to the trusted third party before they could obtain a copy of your key and decrypt your data.
The proble with "key escrow" is that, in theory, without a warrant the government should never have access to your keys, so until the day they get the warrant, there is no way to detect if you are filing bogus keys, or using an additional, non-escrowed, encryption layer before you encrypt with the "Government approved" crypto.
I have every reason to believe that the government will "go on fishing expeditions" to find such behavior, and that the "trusted third party" will be swiftly compromised by every three-letter-agency you can name, along with the mafia, big business, and anybody else with bribe money and an interest in obtaining your secrets, your credit card number, or your love letters.
The real question is do we implement backdoors in all available crypto (very dangerous and generally unsafe) or do we mandate 'key escrow' on all international or inter-state crypto transactions?
I do not believe it would be constitutional for the Federal government to require any restrictions on individuals, groups, or businesses using crypto for transactions that do not cross state lines.
It does not take much to capitalize on the reaction to a major disturbing incident to revoke civil liberties. I don't have a problem with tighter airport security. What concerns me are provisions for more monitoring of all Americans, additional restrictions on the freedom to travel, and the relaxation of standards for wiretaps.
Februrary 28, 1933
At a cabinet meeting held later in the morning, the Chancellor demanded an
emergency decree to overcome the crisis. He met little resistance from the cabinet.
That evening, the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor went to the President and the befuddled old man signed the decree "for the Protection of the people and the State."
The Emergency Decree stated: "Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the
rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house
searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed."
Does any of this sound familiar? Can you not see similarities to the proposed 'new FBI powers' and 'relaxed wiretap requirements' discussed in Congress today?
Granted, perhaps the most recent terrorist bombings
were no Reichstag fire. Is that any excuse for ignoring the lessons of history?
Your mis-reading of the term "well regulated militia" aside, I have one thing to say:
Where does the 2nd amendment say that the right is restricted only to the members of said militia?
" A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."
What does the term "the right of the people" mean in this context? Does it not mean the same as it does here:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
And more relevant to the questions Stallman brings up in his original article:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except incases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
And finally:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Slashdot Mirror
There is A much older anti-logo site at http://www.msen.com/~mwg/anti-logo-links.html
Over time, the logos grew larger, more opaque, staying on-screen 100% of the time, and lately I've been seeing more and more animated logos. They're getting to be as obnoxious as banner ads.
This product is considerably less expensive than SecurID. I spent several weeks testing the product last fall, and found no major security issues with their algorithm nor with the server software, just some minor unix permissions issues with the software installation process itself.
A free implementation of the SNK routines can be found in the open source Firewall Tool Kit.
There are several hardware and software implementations of SNK-004 available. Aside from Cryptocard, Safeword and Axent both offer hardware tokens which have a SNK mode.
Aside from the problem of default and backdoor passwords, there are huge numbers of devices deployed with SNMP enabled and configured with RO/RW community strings as public/private.
Any day now some crew will start distributing 'rootkit' firmware versions of IOS with zombie functionality in the binary.
When there is a critical security hole in IOS, Cisco has been very good about releasing IOS revisions with the fix even to customers without any Cisco service contract.
The system works reasonably well, aside from the various political abuses.
Specifically, people have been wrongfully denied for political reasons, the records that the law requires to be destroyed are being held indefinitely, and NICS mysteriously goes down on the biggest gun show weekends of the year.
Even though the law was passed with what were thought was adequate safegaurds, it has taken years and extensive effort to change the recordkeeping activities of the FBI:
http://www.capitolcitypublishers.com/news/jtech/jAs to the 'racist' accusations, what makes you think I have not traveled to Germany? That I haven't seen their police and ID checks with my own eyes? That I am not myself of German ethnicity?
You must register with the local police where you live, update your registration when you move, show your papers whenever requested, and can be fined or arrested for not having your ID. That is the system that the original post was praising.
How is that not a police state?
You have a point, but so did my message, thus my message was not flamebait.
Actually, one person wasted their modpoint by modding the post down as 'flamebait' where they would have been better served by modding your comment up.
The situation friday2k describes sure sounds like a police state to me: (emphasis mine)
Not yet. As AT&T used to say, "You will".
This is a dangerous approach to take. If we actually need a 'National ID system' to solve a specific problem (many Americans are unconvinced) then it should be designed and implemented in such a way as to solve the problem at hand, with inherent safeguards to prevent abuse, now or in the future.
If we build a system that has the potential to be abused by individuals, by corporations, or by the state, then it will be abused.
As little trust I have in our current government, I have even less reason to trust in a future administration's response to future threats.
not living in a police state where any petty official may demand "Zeigen Sie Ihre Papiere, Kameraden!".
Yes, systems can be abused,and in the long run, all systems will be abused. If we create the necessary infrastructure for the government and corporations to track us today, they may not use it for less noble purposes now. But under a more conservative administration, after a more distressing terrorist event, they will use the database we build today to empower the big brother of tomorrow.
The basic premise of 'National ID' systems is that if we build a database of all law-abiding trustworthy citizens, anybody who does not exist in this database must be a 'prohibited person'.
This premise is also one of the biggest dangers of a national ID, and the primary objection raised by civil libertarians and the ultra paranoid.
The 'Brady Bill' background check law was written with a safeguard- all records of 'successful' checks were to be deleted. In reality, the Clinton administration ignored this limitation, holding records indefinitely.
The same sort of behavior can be expected regarding any safeguards built into a 'National ID' system.
This may violate the EULA or 'shrinkwrap contract' for the software, but is not generally a criminal act.
When you find a flaw in an application, contacting the vendor regarding the bug is a good idea. Asking them for compensation is a bad idea, and if it is phrased in any way that could possibly be construed as blackmail, could be a criminal act.
IANAL, but I do find, report, and publicize security holes in software.
At the time I found the idea appealing for other reasons (free porn!), but there are other, more noble, positive aspects.
Unlike 'Code Red', Nimda does not spread by pushing the worm binary in the HTTP request. The worm uses HTTP to find a vulnerable IIS server, then causes the IIS server to make a TFTP request out to the attacking host to retrieve the ~64K binary.
Most normal 'secure firewall' products aren't tuned to block outbound requests from the protected servers to internet hosts. Mine are, but that only gave me about 72 hours of lead time before it came in another way...
Even when firewalls block the IIS scanning, Nimda spreads by email, file shares, and by putting a copy of 'README.EXE' in the root of the IIS server and adding Javascript to all web pages on the server, pushing the worm at users of the infected web site server.
My firewalls block _all_ UDP packets, but my network still got hit hard, and probably incurred more like $60K in 'paper losses' -- lost productivity, bandwidth, overtime, etc.
We haven't found 'patient zero', but we have two good suspects, in both cases a user with a laptop that did not have updated anti-virus software and that got infected from one of these routes:
The common thread here is user error.
The best firewall is no protection against malicious, or just plain ignorant, users. Blame also falls on local admins for failing to push virus signature updates and keep up with system patches.
I've only ever seen around a dozen inside hosts from which the work was actively scanning HTTP, but the worm traffic from those dozen machines alone was enough to severely degrade WAN and firewall performance.
Of post-tax pay?
Or six months of basic living expenses?
(If your income and your monthly expenses are just about equal, then you're making a big mistake!)
As a hedge against unemployment or other unforseen disaster, having sufficient liquid assets to pay your bills and buy groceries for six months, without having to sell off your stocks, cash in your IRA, or liquidate your CD's (the flat round shiny kind) is a smart idea.
Keeping six months of after-tax income in cash or cash equivalent is unrealistic. For most people, if they have that kind of money laying around today, it's allocated for the down-payment on a house.
I'm sure that if U.S. dollars were eliminated as legal tender, the drug dealers would find some other easily-transported and untraceable medium of exchange.
Just because they are criminals, does not automatically mean they are stupid.
There have also been reports of government pressure on car dealers and other dealers in high-priced symbols of wealth to strongly discourage them from accepting cash.
On a related note: I tried to convince the car dealer to accept my VISA card when purchasing a new car (I get 2% cash back), and they wouldn't go for it. I had to bring in a cashier's check.
As far as firearms deaths, there is no 'large number of accidental deaths' that occur each year. The accidental firearms death rate in the USA decreases every year, between 1960 and 1990 the accidental death rate from firearms fell almost 150%. In 1998, we had 866 'accidental' firearms deaths, this number is considered to be artificially inflated by mis-classified suicides.
Also, 'if all legal owners of guns are registered', then within a decade or so, those same registration lists will be used to implement bans and confiscation.
Sounds like unrealistic paranoia?
Consider this: Every single US city or state that has firearms registration laws has, within two decades, used those same laws to implement a 'freeze' on ownership, bans on types of weapons, or outright confiscation. Every single time.
Do we expect anything different from crypto registration?
You're right in that the fancy chairs, quirky offices, and freebies were simply symptoms of the disease that killed dotcoms, but America is all about treating the symptoms.
But there's no way I am giving up my funky mesh chair.
I don't like to cook, I don't have any interest in eco-anything, and I like buying the latest/fastest/strongest hardware.
Remember, there's no shame in being filthy rich.
The bottom line is this: Just because they have a warrant, doesn't mean you should be forced to make it easy for them to decrypt your message.
With current wiretap orders they can tap your phone, but if you use a voice scrambler, there's nothing illegal about that, even though it makes their wiretap order worthless.
The article, and most every serious proposal for this type of application, including the 'Clipper chip' specifically suggest "key escrow" as a solution.
IOW, you do not have a "special police key that the data also is encrypted to, but rather, for every key you generate, you generate a second key and hand it to a trusted third party.
In theory, the government would need to obtain a search warrant or 'digital wiretap order' and present this to the trusted third party before they could obtain a copy of your key and decrypt your data.
The proble with "key escrow" is that, in theory, without a warrant the government should never have access to your keys, so until the day they get the warrant, there is no way to detect if you are filing bogus keys, or using an additional, non-escrowed, encryption layer before you encrypt with the "Government approved" crypto.
I have every reason to believe that the government will "go on fishing expeditions" to find such behavior, and that the "trusted third party" will be swiftly compromised by every three-letter-agency you can name, along with the mafia, big business, and anybody else with bribe money and an interest in obtaining your secrets, your credit card number, or your love letters.
I do not believe it would be constitutional for the Federal government to require any restrictions on individuals, groups, or businesses using crypto for transactions that do not cross state lines.
Februrary 28, 1933
Does any of this sound familiar? Can you not see similarities to the proposed 'new FBI powers' and 'relaxed wiretap requirements' discussed in Congress today?
Granted, perhaps the most recent terrorist bombings were no Reichstag fire. Is that any excuse for ignoring the lessons of history?
Where does the 2nd amendment say that the right is restricted only to the members of said militia?
What does the term "the right of the people" mean in this context? Does it not mean the same as it does here:And more relevant to the questions Stallman brings up in his original article:
And finally: