"I don't fear any reprisal from the US government for that criticism."
That is a bit of a stretch, considering that critics of US foreign policy have found themselves unable to board airplanes. Sure, it is not as bad as what happens in China, but let's not act like the US is all roses and that criticism of the government goes unpunished. Only a few years ago, my friends were imprisoned for peacefully protesting the RNC in New York. Like I said, not as bad as China, but certainly nothing close to ideal...
More to the point, it assumes that the average Facebook user even perceives a privacy or freedom issue; even those that do care may simply be unaware of the implications that Facebook use carries.
"I doubt if any Facebook user thinks that anything on Facebook is private."
Why do you doubt this? Look at the way people react when Facebook changes its "privacy settings." People have an expectation, even if they do not explicitly state it, that when they set some part of their profile as "private" or "for friends only," that it will remain "private" or "for friends only." Most people really do not stay informed on these issues, or even understand what a web server is or how it works.
"The thought of officers perusing a public forum - hosted on a network built by the Department of Defense - where people have been given no expectation of privacy simply brings that model to the modern age."
No, it is different, because it gives the police much greater access, more constant access, more automated access, and access that is not limited to a small group of officers. It is one thing for the police to read a fugitive's Facebook profile to try and figure out where that person is, but there is little to prevent mass spying on the general population. Facebook frowns on the practice, but the police could program a computer to trawl through Facebook profiles, collecting data not just on suspects but also on their families, friends, neighbors, etc., or even just collecting data on random people.
Look, I used to assign blame to individuals, with the standard, "We keep warning them, and if they ignore us, too bad" philosophy. Really though, the government should not be using the stupidity of the general population in order to subvert the rights of the people, even if the general public fails to understand that they have rights or why those rights are important.
Why do you particularly trust Obama more than Bush? Obama's allegiance is, like Bush's was, to large corporations; it is simply a different set of corporations. When it comes to what is best for the people of America, both Obama and his administration operate under the assumption that the only way to benefit American citizens is to increase the profits of American corporations, even if that means subverting democratic processes at home and abroad. If you are not worried about your government sidestepping the very democratic principles that it was founded upon, then what exactly were you worried about when it came to Republicans?
Except that patent encumbered codecs make it difficult for some users to create or view content *now,* which is the problem. Wikipedia is supposed to be for everyone, including people who cannot obtain patented codecs (such people do exist), both for viewing and for creating the videos. I would certainly not encourage Wikipedia's users to violate patent law in their respective localities -- the last thing Wikipedia needs is a lawsuit to deal with.
It is not a question of compromise, it is a question of the goal of Wikipedia, which is to be as accessible as possible.
You are not the majority of people. Most people have no idea how email works; they do not realize that copies are being made, or that the message is traveling through multiple systems on its way to its destination. They think email is a form of private communication because it does not involve posting something on a publicly accessible website, and that is the line where 4th amendment protections should be drawn.
Since that is not the line, people should start encrypting their emails.
"Lots of these "dumb endusers" fully understand the security and the solution and the cost,"
Not my experience, not by a long shot. Most people do not care enough about security to learn about it. For example, advising users to actually read warnings about SSL -- after 5 words, they are bored and go back to ignoring SSL warnings (and in some cases, falling victim to MITM attacks). We are not talking about costly solutions here, just basic, unintrusive guidelines that people are ignoring.
What stops this process from being automated or performed en masse? There are chat bots that could carry on a conversation with a person long enough to convince the person to accept a friend request, and the government could then simply download the entire profile that the person posted -- and continue to receive updates, and all done automatically. It would not be trivial, but it is certainly conceivable that such an operation could be carried out by a large agency that employs expert programmers.
No, we are talking about government agents create fake profiles for the purpose of extracting information from people and granting access to the profile to other agents, and then calling it an "undercover operation." It is the equivalent of a government agent convincing someone to give the agent a key to their home, so that law enforcement personnel can wander through their house and look through their things.
It is as much of a privacy issue as an FBI agent going undercover as a babysitter would be. If it is just a technique for finding information on people who are already suspects in a crime, it is a prudent method for gathering evidence; but if and when the situation changes and the government starts using these tactics against random people, just to see if crimes are being committed, then it is a serious invasion of privacy.
Some of it concerns "public" information -- that is, information that the user expects to be public -- but some of the techniques described involve "friending" a person under investigation, and then having access to their entire profile. It is not "hacking," but it has a similar effect.
Except that this is different, in that once an agent has "friended" you on Facebook, your profile becomes available to the entire investigative agency. If an agent meets me at the bar and engages me in conversation, they learn only as much as I tell them -- perhaps that is a significant amount, perhaps they can use that conversation to investigate me further, but they are not receiving a profile of my entire life, and they cannot continue questioning me when I am not around. It is the nature of round-the-clock access to a person's profile and life, and the spillover into their friend's lives (now the agent can read wall posts and various other little hints about what your friends are up to) that makes this a more intrusive form of investigation.
However, the government should not be taking advantage of stupidity to undermine our rights. It is one thing for an agent to communicate with people who are already under investigation -- such as with your state police friend who communicates with gang members -- but it is an entirely different story when the government starts randomly probing into people's lives. The line is very, very fine here...
Facebook is popular because its users believe that their information is not publicly available. Yes, it is a complete falsehood, but the reality of life is that most people do not realize just how public the information on Facebook really is, and that is why these sorts of activities are so problematic. We are supposed to live in a country where the government does not arbitrarily spy on its citizens, even for the purposes of law enforcement.
Sadly, most people see encryption as an annoyance that prevents them from checking their email on random computers. They do not frankly care about whether the government reads their mail, "I have nothing hide," etc. Convenience trumps all, always.
It should not be limited to sensitive email for the following reasons:
This gives the government a clue about what emails you really want to hide -- and then they will just focus on those, possibly harassing the recipients.
Some stupid politician will see this behavior and declare that email encryption is suspicious and pass some UK/China-esque laws about it.
You never really know what statements of yours can be used against you. I read about a case where someone saying, "My life is over..." as they were arrested was accepted as evidence of their guilt. You may think a particular message is innocent, but there is no way to tell.
Even your truly innocent messages can be turned into data points for the government (or a third party) to construct a profile about you, which can then be used as part of a broader attack.
From what I hear, the likelihood of Norway agreeing to ACTA is fairly low -- they still value the rights of their citizens more than the interests of foreign companies. Or so I am told.
Would you be surprised? Hm, Microsoft funding someone who is suing a torrent website that encourages people to share...yeah...like that is within the realm of possibility...
"If you get some variation of the same question over and over again, you need to (better) explain it in the docs."
The problem is that people simply do not take the time to read the docs, and can you really blame them? The closest thing to a "Fedora manual" that I have seen is a 900+ page book in the computer section of my local bookstore -- and that really skims over a lot of details. It would be ludicrous to expect end users to read through that, just as it would be ludicrous to expect them to read through the equivalent Windows book(s).
Of course, many Windows users have a number they can call for help, whether it is through the company that built their computer, their employer or school, or some other source. They ask the same questions over and over again too, but nobody is saying "document Windows better," they are content to just rely on these helpdesks. For open source OSes, the burden of providing helpdesk-like support often falls on the community.
"If a user finds an actual bug, don't make them have to sign up for some service or other that they'll (hopefully) only need once (i.e. Bugzilla) to report it. Maybe have a bugs@myproject.org to triage."
If only that were still feasible; I would love such a solution, but the volume has grown too large in recent years. Look at how heavily trafficked the LKML is, or the Fedora development list -- many thousands of messages in a given week, just from the discussion about how to fix bugs. If bug reporting were done on these mailing lists, it would be completely unmanageable, especially given the way novices often report their bugs, which could defy the best attempts at filtering (e.g. "Everything froze when I tried to click my mouse" -- is this a kernel panic? Xorg crash? Perhaps a window is stealing focus? There are a dozen places where such a problem could originate).
Again, the burden of support falls on the community. I deal with a lot of novice users, and usually I just wind up reporting the bugs on my own.
"CLEARLY provide SOME way to contact SOMEBODY actively involved with the project. Keep this updated if you don't want to be getting annoyed emails five years from now."
We almost always do, and certainly when something is packaged in a major distro there are people who can be contacted (the package maintainers). Open source is a community effort, so the only time where that becomes a problem is when nobody is actively involved (an abandoned project). In such cases, there is little anyone can do, except to pick up the responsibility for the project. This is just a fact of life; at least there is still the option of someone picking up the package later, if they want to (as opposed to a proprietary vendor ending support for some software, and leaving the remaining users high and dry!).
"If it's a Linux app, it would be kinda nice if it worked/looked good under ANY desktop, not just your personal favorite."
Why restrict this to Linux? The problem of different toolkits that do not integrate well with the OS is pretty universal. I have seen Windows applications using GTK, Qt, Wx, Win32, Swing, etc. -- all looking totally different, all having different configuration back ends, and they often fail to play well with each other. It is true, you more commonly see different toolkits in Unix-like OSes, as a result of the history of X11, but again, this is by no means restricted to Linux or open source development; I still see proprietary packages using Motif and even Xt.
You completely missed my point, put words in my mouth (where did I say they were "dumb?"), and you are mischaracterizing libre operating systems. Nobody has to choose between different package managers, except if they want to try out different distros -- each distro is, really, a different operating system, albeit one that is very similar to the other distros. If you install Fedora, as an example, you only ever use rpm as the package manager, and you get friendly tools like PackageKit to help you manage your software with rpm as the back end.
The problem that I was pointing out was that most Windows and Mac OS users simply have no concept of a package manager. The closest Windows gets is MSI, which is only really used by a handful of vendors, and which most users are not really aware of (yes, hidden in the "control panel," at least back in the days of XP, there is a program that allows you to uninstall the programs on your system -- roughly half of what a package manager does in Linux distros). Mac OS has fink, which is only used by a minority of particularly technical users. The fact of the matter is, most Windows and Mac OS users have been conditioned to think that software installation involves either obtaining a disc of some sort, or going to a website to download an installer program. Looking at a repository is not even a concept for them, and no matter how friendly package managers become, that initial hurdle is a serious problem when it comes to the adoption of libre operating systems.
The reality is, though, that the most serious secrets are not the ones being posted on Wikileaks -- because if they could be leaked to Wikileaks, it would already be too late.
No, but we should have access to past data -- it was once common for the archives of the presidential offices to be opened to the public a decade or two after the end of a particular administration (W. ended that tradition). The only two items on your list that should have a longer period are the launch codes (which are not changed so frequently) and the personal information of soldiers (which should remain private for the sake of the soldiers and their families). The rest should be made public knowledge in a timely fashion -- military equipment is constantly upgraded, troop movements are no longer sensitive after the end of the war, and guard schedules should be changed frequently. Why should this information remain secret forever?
Slashdot Mirror
Who was referring to this guy as a "teabagger?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_churchill
"I don't fear any reprisal from the US government for that criticism."
That is a bit of a stretch, considering that critics of US foreign policy have found themselves unable to board airplanes. Sure, it is not as bad as what happens in China, but let's not act like the US is all roses and that criticism of the government goes unpunished. Only a few years ago, my friends were imprisoned for peacefully protesting the RNC in New York. Like I said, not as bad as China, but certainly nothing close to ideal...
"Who said we WANT to be saved?!?"
Some of us do. Most people do not care enough to even read about the issues though...
More to the point, it assumes that the average Facebook user even perceives a privacy or freedom issue; even those that do care may simply be unaware of the implications that Facebook use carries.
"I doubt if any Facebook user thinks that anything on Facebook is private."
Why do you doubt this? Look at the way people react when Facebook changes its "privacy settings." People have an expectation, even if they do not explicitly state it, that when they set some part of their profile as "private" or "for friends only," that it will remain "private" or "for friends only." Most people really do not stay informed on these issues, or even understand what a web server is or how it works.
"The thought of officers perusing a public forum - hosted on a network built by the Department of Defense - where people have been given no expectation of privacy simply brings that model to the modern age."
No, it is different, because it gives the police much greater access, more constant access, more automated access, and access that is not limited to a small group of officers. It is one thing for the police to read a fugitive's Facebook profile to try and figure out where that person is, but there is little to prevent mass spying on the general population. Facebook frowns on the practice, but the police could program a computer to trawl through Facebook profiles, collecting data not just on suspects but also on their families, friends, neighbors, etc., or even just collecting data on random people.
Look, I used to assign blame to individuals, with the standard, "We keep warning them, and if they ignore us, too bad" philosophy. Really though, the government should not be using the stupidity of the general population in order to subvert the rights of the people, even if the general public fails to understand that they have rights or why those rights are important.
There is something strange about those numbers...like more exemptions than actual requests? Maybe I am reading it wrong...
Why do you particularly trust Obama more than Bush? Obama's allegiance is, like Bush's was, to large corporations; it is simply a different set of corporations. When it comes to what is best for the people of America, both Obama and his administration operate under the assumption that the only way to benefit American citizens is to increase the profits of American corporations, even if that means subverting democratic processes at home and abroad. If you are not worried about your government sidestepping the very democratic principles that it was founded upon, then what exactly were you worried about when it came to Republicans?
Man, now I feel like I have a dirty mind...
Except that patent encumbered codecs make it difficult for some users to create or view content *now,* which is the problem. Wikipedia is supposed to be for everyone, including people who cannot obtain patented codecs (such people do exist), both for viewing and for creating the videos. I would certainly not encourage Wikipedia's users to violate patent law in their respective localities -- the last thing Wikipedia needs is a lawsuit to deal with.
It is not a question of compromise, it is a question of the goal of Wikipedia, which is to be as accessible as possible.
You are not the majority of people. Most people have no idea how email works; they do not realize that copies are being made, or that the message is traveling through multiple systems on its way to its destination. They think email is a form of private communication because it does not involve posting something on a publicly accessible website, and that is the line where 4th amendment protections should be drawn.
Since that is not the line, people should start encrypting their emails.
"Lots of these "dumb endusers" fully understand the security and the solution and the cost,"
Not my experience, not by a long shot. Most people do not care enough about security to learn about it. For example, advising users to actually read warnings about SSL -- after 5 words, they are bored and go back to ignoring SSL warnings (and in some cases, falling victim to MITM attacks). We are not talking about costly solutions here, just basic, unintrusive guidelines that people are ignoring.
What stops this process from being automated or performed en masse? There are chat bots that could carry on a conversation with a person long enough to convince the person to accept a friend request, and the government could then simply download the entire profile that the person posted -- and continue to receive updates, and all done automatically. It would not be trivial, but it is certainly conceivable that such an operation could be carried out by a large agency that employs expert programmers.
No, we are talking about government agents create fake profiles for the purpose of extracting information from people and granting access to the profile to other agents, and then calling it an "undercover operation." It is the equivalent of a government agent convincing someone to give the agent a key to their home, so that law enforcement personnel can wander through their house and look through their things.
It is as much of a privacy issue as an FBI agent going undercover as a babysitter would be. If it is just a technique for finding information on people who are already suspects in a crime, it is a prudent method for gathering evidence; but if and when the situation changes and the government starts using these tactics against random people, just to see if crimes are being committed, then it is a serious invasion of privacy.
Some of it concerns "public" information -- that is, information that the user expects to be public -- but some of the techniques described involve "friending" a person under investigation, and then having access to their entire profile. It is not "hacking," but it has a similar effect.
Except that this is different, in that once an agent has "friended" you on Facebook, your profile becomes available to the entire investigative agency. If an agent meets me at the bar and engages me in conversation, they learn only as much as I tell them -- perhaps that is a significant amount, perhaps they can use that conversation to investigate me further, but they are not receiving a profile of my entire life, and they cannot continue questioning me when I am not around. It is the nature of round-the-clock access to a person's profile and life, and the spillover into their friend's lives (now the agent can read wall posts and various other little hints about what your friends are up to) that makes this a more intrusive form of investigation.
However, the government should not be taking advantage of stupidity to undermine our rights. It is one thing for an agent to communicate with people who are already under investigation -- such as with your state police friend who communicates with gang members -- but it is an entirely different story when the government starts randomly probing into people's lives. The line is very, very fine here...
Facebook is popular because its users believe that their information is not publicly available. Yes, it is a complete falsehood, but the reality of life is that most people do not realize just how public the information on Facebook really is, and that is why these sorts of activities are so problematic. We are supposed to live in a country where the government does not arbitrarily spy on its citizens, even for the purposes of law enforcement.
Sadly, most people see encryption as an annoyance that prevents them from checking their email on random computers. They do not frankly care about whether the government reads their mail, "I have nothing hide," etc. Convenience trumps all, always.
From what I hear, the likelihood of Norway agreeing to ACTA is fairly low -- they still value the rights of their citizens more than the interests of foreign companies. Or so I am told.
Would you be surprised? Hm, Microsoft funding someone who is suing a torrent website that encourages people to share...yeah...like that is within the realm of possibility...
"If you get some variation of the same question over and over again, you need to (better) explain it in the docs."
The problem is that people simply do not take the time to read the docs, and can you really blame them? The closest thing to a "Fedora manual" that I have seen is a 900+ page book in the computer section of my local bookstore -- and that really skims over a lot of details. It would be ludicrous to expect end users to read through that, just as it would be ludicrous to expect them to read through the equivalent Windows book(s).
Of course, many Windows users have a number they can call for help, whether it is through the company that built their computer, their employer or school, or some other source. They ask the same questions over and over again too, but nobody is saying "document Windows better," they are content to just rely on these helpdesks. For open source OSes, the burden of providing helpdesk-like support often falls on the community.
"If a user finds an actual bug, don't make them have to sign up for some service or other that they'll (hopefully) only need once (i.e. Bugzilla) to report it. Maybe have a bugs@myproject.org to triage."
If only that were still feasible; I would love such a solution, but the volume has grown too large in recent years. Look at how heavily trafficked the LKML is, or the Fedora development list -- many thousands of messages in a given week, just from the discussion about how to fix bugs. If bug reporting were done on these mailing lists, it would be completely unmanageable, especially given the way novices often report their bugs, which could defy the best attempts at filtering (e.g. "Everything froze when I tried to click my mouse" -- is this a kernel panic? Xorg crash? Perhaps a window is stealing focus? There are a dozen places where such a problem could originate).
Again, the burden of support falls on the community. I deal with a lot of novice users, and usually I just wind up reporting the bugs on my own.
"CLEARLY provide SOME way to contact SOMEBODY actively involved with the project. Keep this updated if you don't want to be getting annoyed emails five years from now."
We almost always do, and certainly when something is packaged in a major distro there are people who can be contacted (the package maintainers). Open source is a community effort, so the only time where that becomes a problem is when nobody is actively involved (an abandoned project). In such cases, there is little anyone can do, except to pick up the responsibility for the project. This is just a fact of life; at least there is still the option of someone picking up the package later, if they want to (as opposed to a proprietary vendor ending support for some software, and leaving the remaining users high and dry!).
"If it's a Linux app, it would be kinda nice if it worked/looked good under ANY desktop, not just your personal favorite."
Why restrict this to Linux? The problem of different toolkits that do not integrate well with the OS is pretty universal. I have seen Windows applications using GTK, Qt, Wx, Win32, Swing, etc. -- all looking totally different, all having different configuration back ends, and they often fail to play well with each other. It is true, you more commonly see different toolkits in Unix-like OSes, as a result of the history of X11, but again, this is by no means restricted to Linux or open source development; I still see proprietary packages using Motif and even Xt.
You completely missed my point, put words in my mouth (where did I say they were "dumb?"), and you are mischaracterizing libre operating systems. Nobody has to choose between different package managers, except if they want to try out different distros -- each distro is, really, a different operating system, albeit one that is very similar to the other distros. If you install Fedora, as an example, you only ever use rpm as the package manager, and you get friendly tools like PackageKit to help you manage your software with rpm as the back end.
The problem that I was pointing out was that most Windows and Mac OS users simply have no concept of a package manager. The closest Windows gets is MSI, which is only really used by a handful of vendors, and which most users are not really aware of (yes, hidden in the "control panel," at least back in the days of XP, there is a program that allows you to uninstall the programs on your system -- roughly half of what a package manager does in Linux distros). Mac OS has fink, which is only used by a minority of particularly technical users. The fact of the matter is, most Windows and Mac OS users have been conditioned to think that software installation involves either obtaining a disc of some sort, or going to a website to download an installer program. Looking at a repository is not even a concept for them, and no matter how friendly package managers become, that initial hurdle is a serious problem when it comes to the adoption of libre operating systems.
The reality is, though, that the most serious secrets are not the ones being posted on Wikileaks -- because if they could be leaked to Wikileaks, it would already be too late.
No, but we should have access to past data -- it was once common for the archives of the presidential offices to be opened to the public a decade or two after the end of a particular administration (W. ended that tradition). The only two items on your list that should have a longer period are the launch codes (which are not changed so frequently) and the personal information of soldiers (which should remain private for the sake of the soldiers and their families). The rest should be made public knowledge in a timely fashion -- military equipment is constantly upgraded, troop movements are no longer sensitive after the end of the war, and guard schedules should be changed frequently. Why should this information remain secret forever?