If you RTFA, you'll see why. This was done by ICE, because it involved a movement of money across US borders and abroad that violated customs regulations by violating the laws of one of the states the money originated in.
The scary thing here is that this move is actually an attack on the Internet itself -- it is an attack on a global, borderless network. If every website is forced to follow the laws of every country whose citizens might connect to that website, or in other words the laws of every country in the entire world, it will be impossible to run a website. What will happen is an increase in the number of website that refuse to provide service to people from certain countries, and eventually an Internet that is fractured and divided into regulatory domains and whatnot. Not that people in the government have a problem with that; from TFA:
Many of the harms that underlie gambling prohibitions are exacerbated when the enterprises operate over the Internet without regulation
It is not hard to guess what these people want to do to the Internet.
Here is the illegal activity, according to your definition:
In February 1971 Ellsberg discussed the study with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, and gave 43 of the volumes to him in March
Of course, this is how that case ended:
On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court decided, 6â"3, that the government failed to meet the heavy burden of proof required for prior restraint injunction
Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
(Justice Black)
Indeed, I wonder how you think America can continue to be a free country if the press does not solicit and publish important foreign policy material. You think diplomatic cables are not something the public needs to read? What about this one, which affected domestic and foreign policy for decades:
The deals and assessments made by US diplomats have important implications for the American people, and may affect future decisions made by our leaders. Over the past decade alone, the US has made a number of unpopular foreign policy decisions; it is likely that over the next decade, several more will be made. How are people expected to understand those decisions and their motivations if large portions of background material are secret, classified documents?
That is the importance Wikileaks serves: they make citizens and stakeholders aware of what governments, corporations, and other organizations are doing. This is no less important today than it was when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, and there is no sign that world governments are becoming more transparent of their own volition (the opposite trend is apparent: more secrecy and less transparency).
What I find interesting is that many of my friends were supportive of Wikileaks for publishing corporate secrets (which damaged the reputations of those businesses), publishing the secrets of other governments (e.g. Nigeria), and even publishing the collateral murder video. When the diplomatic cables were published, suddenly everyone was in an uproar, as if it is OK to leak everything else and to show how the military killed two journalists, but not OK to expose the secret deals that the US government makes with other countries or the assessments made by US diplomats (even though those assessments may have far-reaching implications -- remember the "Long Telegram?").
That is exactly the point here: Assange did not actively do anything to leak the documents, he only led an effort to make the leaked documents available to the world.
Isn't that still a draft? It would be nice to see mesh networks rise, especially in urban areas, although there tend to be more ISPs to choose from in urban areas anyway. When I think of independent WISP coops, I think of neglected rural areas or areas around small cities, where there is only one or two broadband options available (if any at all), but plenty of empty space that can be traversed by 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz links. Equipment for that sort of thing is pretty cheap, and I have even heard of people using DD-WRT on "consumer" routers to create repeaters (staying within FCC limits may be tough here; I am not entirely clear on whether or not it is legal to connect some cheap Netgear router to a 24dBi antenna, even if you take the time to measure power levels and such).
Nothing stops anyone from setting up a small-scale wireless ISP -- you can use 802.11a/b/g/n/y at a relatively low cost (compared to fiber/cable hardlines/etc.), and create a new, uncensored network. Get some high gain antennas and repeaters for point-to-point wireless backhaul links, and you could work your way toward a large city with many ISPs to choose from (or perhaps toward an industrial area). You could peer with similar efforts in your region, and eventually form a regional network that is beyond the reach of the big ISPs.
I am aware of a few efforts like the above in the mountains around where I live; it is a bit of work, but really not as much as you might expect. The biggest obstacles are forests, which attenuate the signal, and animals, which occasionally knock down antennas. It is harder to do this in crowded urban areas, but there are many millions of people who do not live in cities.
What defines the Internet is its protocol -- one common protocol that allows people to communicate across various networks and networking technologies. That is why the Internet can always route around censorship: anyone can establish a net network and attach it to the Internet (though in practice, by the time things got bad enough to motivate people to do such a thing, it would be far too difficult to create a network free from censorship; see: China).
Universities exist to educate students, and I would say that the idea of a university censoring anything, including what websites its students can access, is antithetical to that -- and it should be unthinkable. If malware is a concern, just disconnect infected systems from the network and refuse to assign them IP addresses until the issue is resolved.
It is not so much that I want a massive expansion; I would prefer a law based on affirmative defense, where the defendant could explain to the court that there was a good/excusable reason for the crime, or that the crime was committed out desperation (e.g. breaking into someone's home because your children are starving and you have not been able to find a job should receive a less severe sentence than breaking into someone's home for some other reason; hate crimes laws take the opposite approach, that certain crimes are more severely punished). Note that affirmative defense is not unheard of; killing someone to save your own life is an affirmative defense, even though killing would generally be prosecuted as murder or manslaughter. If that is not something that can happen, if instead we would prefer sentencing enhancements for hate-motivated crimes, then let the law be written in a way that requires the prosecution show that the crime was committed as an expression of hatred -- regardless of the reason for the hatred.
The problem I have with the law as it exists right now is that it selects particular victim groups as "favored," while completely ignoring others. In general, this is how society has come to view discrimination; elsewhere I gave the example of a common slur, "gypped," which nobody seems to even blink at, while the very similar slur "Jewed" seems to be frowned upon, and a slur like "nigged" seems to be unthinkable. Why should any of these slurs be more acceptable than the others? The problem is that we have listed particular groups (Jews, black people, homosexuals) as being "victim groups," while other groups (gypsies, homeless people, nerds) are still "fair game." Unfortunately, the law has come to reflect this sort of thinking, although with a little less tolerance for discrimination (you can be charged with a hate crime for beating up gypsies, because they are an ethnic group).
The narrowest and most specific law would be one that does not even attempt to probe a person's state of mind when a crime was committed. You beat someone up; it does not matter whether you did it because they are a member of a particular group, because you want to send a message to a rival gang, because you were drunk, or any other reason. Most people would find that to be too narrow, and would rather broaden the law so that beating someone up because of a drug-induced psychosis is not lumped together with beating someone up because they are a black man dating a white woman. I agree that it is too narrow; as I said, I would prefer a framework based on affirmative defense, where the prosecution only needs to prove that you committed a crime, and the defense can opt to prove that the crime was committed for an acceptable or less heinous reason if there is no room for reasonable doubt, for a lesser sentence.
Now, in general, I am a fan of reducing prison terms and focusing more on punishments based on fines, community service, and so forth. Prison is a money sink, versus community service which increases the wealth of society. It is a fine line, of course, between community service and slavery, which is where we must be careful; however, I would prefer to walk that line than to try to navigate the line between prison-based punishment and an Orwellian nightmare (about which the US system already raises questions -- we have more prisoners than any other country, and the private prison industry is continuing to grow).
Legislators sit around and spend a lot of time carefully coming up with the list
No, lobbyists with the support of the media pressure politicians to include the group they represent on the list, in a way that appears to be politically neutral. That is why nerds do not appear on the list, why homeless people appear only on some state lists, etc. These are politically motivated lists, not carefully planned efforts at protecting society from itself.
"Do you see WoW "nerds" getting special protection from bullying, the way homosexuals do?"
Yes.
Where do you live? Here in the United States, hate crimes are defined as crimes motivated by particular categories -- race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc. Being a "nerd" of any sort is not in that category.
I'm honestly curious, do you think that Western criminal jurisprudence should discard the foundational notion of intent in the definition and prosecution of crime?
How about applying it equally? We do not -- hate crimes legislation defines particular categories of hatred that receive sentencing enhancement, and in practice even those categories are only selectively considered. Which particular victim groups receive this special protection depends on which particular groups can get enough lobbying power and media backing. If courts were applying the "if it is motivated by hatred, then increase the sentence" standard fairly, there would only be an argument about whether or not killing someone for being a nerd is a worse crime than killing a defenseless old woman because you wanted her jewelry.
If it were just a matter of "well this guy really hated this other person for being $XYZ," then we would not have amended the law in 2009 to include sexual orientation as a factor.
Unless you are talking about a group that is not covered by hate crimes legislation. Hate crimes legislation does not cover "nerds," even though there are plenty of cases of "nerds" being harassed and subjected to endless verbal abuse for no reason other than that they belong to a particular group. Hate crimes legislation defines particular forms of hatred as being worse than others, and the definition is expanded whenever a powerful political movement, with media backing, steps in to push for such expansion.
Blacks beating up a white should be treated just as harshly as vice versa
Just like non-nerds beating up nerds. The crime is beating someone up; what difference does it make if it was motivated by hatred of a person's race as opposed to their lifestyle, hair color, academic success, or any of dozens of other reasons that people beat each other up? The problem with hate crimes legislation is that it unfairly labels some forms of hatred as being categorically worse than others, and that this labeling is almost always politically motivated.
Actually, many of us nerds were bullied in school. I, for one, was bullied and appreciate hearing society put some pressure on bullies. This very egregious example of bullying deserves the light of day.
Perhaps you should lobby for an expansion of hate crimes laws, so that they cover "nerds" as well.
One of those deserves just having the cops splitting them up and the other jailtime.
Really? Why does one deserve jailtime and the other does not? Why do only some victimized groups get this special protection? Do you see WoW "nerds" getting special protection from bullying, the way homosexuals do?
Hate crimes laws are another way to increase our prison population, without being as overt as the war on drugs. The pattern is familiar: first, the media lets everyone know about the terrible things being done to some particular group; then people lobby for that group to be included in hate crimes laws, with the media pointing to the progress being made by such lobbying; then the laws are amended so that another group receive this special protection. Meanwhile, society goes on victimizing other groups, using various slurs and expressions, and ignoring their plight -- people say they were "gypped" all the time, but nobody bats an eye at it (now imagine if someone said they were "nigged").
Now homosexuals are the victim group de jour, and in 20 years it will be another group. The great thing is that the media can actually seed hatred for a group, then return decades later to talk about the plight of that group (sometimes without even stopping their own encouragement of the hate). While the media was trumpeting the progress of laws to protect black people, it was simultaneously stoking the flames of fear and hatred by portraying black men as dangerous criminals. The media keeps telling us that we should respect homosexuals and treat them like everyone else...and then portrays gay men as particularly effeminate or somehow not being as masculine as straight men.
If you dare question the special legal treatment of homosexuals, you are a homophobe -- and in a particularly ironic twist, you might be accused of being a closet homosexual (by the same people telling you not to harass people for being gay). Naturally, the opinion of a homophobe on these topics is totally irrelevant, whereas the opinions of someone arguing to lock homophobes in prison for long periods of time are important to the conversation.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem here. We are not addressing the problem (the victimization of particular groups), we are just expanding the size of the prison population. Hate crimes laws are worse than knee-jerk reactions: hate crimes laws have been carefully planned out.
The "great" thing about hate crimes laws is that you can never have too many of them. There are so many minorities and victimized groups out there, and we can always use the media to create new ones. The perfect way to tack a few extra years onto a prison sentence and fatten the wallets of the prison industry's investors.
Which is what communication systems are all about: protocol. Facebook is a protocol too, in some sense, but it is one that can only enable communication on the service run by Facebook the company. Compare this to the examples I gave, in which there are well defined rules for how different services can interoperate with each other and exchanges messages.
Furthermore, nobody uses IRC or Usenet anymore
These are claims that we should try to avoid making. There are quite a few IRC and Usenet users left; take a look at Freenode, EFNet, etc., and sci.crypt, rec.radio.shortwave, sci.math, etc. Just because you do not personally use a particular system anymore does not mean that nobody else does. IRC and Usenet are also popular for downloading movies and music, which is certainly a form of communication.
Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced. You're pretty much stuck with one of a handful of email providers.
Which is still much better than the situation on Facebook, where there can be only one service provider.
More to the point, if Facebook were to suddenly change course and allow you to host your own data and provide an open, decentralized service, would you then consider using it?
I could see myself doing so. Keep in mind that there are different levels of openness; Slashdot does not exchange posts with any other system, but you do not have to register with Slashdot to read or post comments. I have also seen links to Slashdot stories posted on various forums (including Usenet), where users of those systems post their own comments; this is substantially harder to do with Facebook, where most things require a login. I would not be terribly opposed to "using" Facebook's service in the sense of visiting a URL, if I did not have to log in to do so.
I would also not be opposed to communicating with Facebook users if Facebook could interoperate with other services or systems. It would not be hard for Facebook to define a basic method of sending messages, friend requests, group memberships, and so forth through other systems.
Might I recommend using a spam filter? I only see one or two spam messages per month...
USENET: 99% spam and zero privacy unless you run your own server
I guess that it depends on which newsgroups you are reading; I rarely see spam in sci.crypt or the other groups I read. As for privacy, I have no clue what it is that you are referring to here -- are you concerned that other people are going to read your messages in a discussion system? That is like claiming that people are going to read the messages that you post in Facebook groups or other forums.
IRC: your non-geek friends have never heard of it.
So what?
I know plenty of non-techie IRC users
It was an example of a system that is not controlled by any monopoly. Would you have preferred that I said XMPP?
you're lucky if you have more than one ISP to choose from.
Except that the Internet is not controlled by that one ISP, only your connection to it. No matter how you connect to Facebook, it is a communication system that is controlled entirely by one company. That is the difference here.
Facebook is different in that the large interconnected user base is what creates the barrier to entry.
No, the fact that Facebook has made no substantial effort at being interoperable with any other system is what creates a barrier to entry.
1) Tried it out before the privacy debacle hit the fan, then found myself held captive with Facebook flat out refusing to delete me even though I followed the 2 week removal procedure to the letter.
Sounds like a compelling reason to stay away from Facebook, to demand that your account be deleted, and to let the news media know about what they are doing.
2) Some of my friends have already been suckered in and Facebook has many communication facilities locked down to members only, so I dusted it off as the only way to stay in touch with them.
"I am not on Facebook"; if your friends refuse to talk to you because you do not use Facebook, then I would reevaluate your relationship with them. Why give in to Facebook's attempt to take control of the world's communication, especially when we have so many systems that are not controlled by any one party?
Possibly, but 1) your fellow prisoners will probably appreciate that you're "sticking it to The Man" and make it a whole lot easier on you than if you'd been convicted of possessing child porn:
You are assuming that your fellow prisoners will stop to listen to your explanation. That assumption may not withstand scrutiny:
Slashdot Mirror
The scary thing here is that this move is actually an attack on the Internet itself -- it is an attack on a global, borderless network. If every website is forced to follow the laws of every country whose citizens might connect to that website, or in other words the laws of every country in the entire world, it will be impossible to run a website. What will happen is an increase in the number of website that refuse to provide service to people from certain countries, and eventually an Internet that is fractured and divided into regulatory domains and whatnot. Not that people in the government have a problem with that; from TFA:
Many of the harms that underlie gambling prohibitions are exacerbated when the enterprises operate over the Internet without regulation
It is not hard to guess what these people want to do to the Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_papers
Here is the illegal activity, according to your definition:
In February 1971 Ellsberg discussed the study with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, and gave 43 of the volumes to him in March
Of course, this is how that case ended:
On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court decided, 6â"3, that the government failed to meet the heavy burden of proof required for prior restraint injunction
Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. (Justice Black)
Indeed, I wonder how you think America can continue to be a free country if the press does not solicit and publish important foreign policy material. You think diplomatic cables are not something the public needs to read? What about this one, which affected domestic and foreign policy for decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Telegram
The deals and assessments made by US diplomats have important implications for the American people, and may affect future decisions made by our leaders. Over the past decade alone, the US has made a number of unpopular foreign policy decisions; it is likely that over the next decade, several more will be made. How are people expected to understand those decisions and their motivations if large portions of background material are secret, classified documents?
That is the importance Wikileaks serves: they make citizens and stakeholders aware of what governments, corporations, and other organizations are doing. This is no less important today than it was when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, and there is no sign that world governments are becoming more transparent of their own volition (the opposite trend is apparent: more secrecy and less transparency).
What I find interesting is that many of my friends were supportive of Wikileaks for publishing corporate secrets (which damaged the reputations of those businesses), publishing the secrets of other governments (e.g. Nigeria), and even publishing the collateral murder video. When the diplomatic cables were published, suddenly everyone was in an uproar, as if it is OK to leak everything else and to show how the military killed two journalists, but not OK to expose the secret deals that the US government makes with other countries or the assessments made by US diplomats (even though those assessments may have far-reaching implications -- remember the "Long Telegram?").
I don't think of Watergate when I think of these leaks; instead, this is what comes to mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_papers
We have been in this situation before, only we were less fascist back then.
That is exactly the point here: Assange did not actively do anything to leak the documents, he only led an effort to make the leaked documents available to the world.
Making the files accessible is illegal
Under the laws of which country?
Did you not get the memo? American laws apply everywhere in the world.
Isn't that still a draft? It would be nice to see mesh networks rise, especially in urban areas, although there tend to be more ISPs to choose from in urban areas anyway. When I think of independent WISP coops, I think of neglected rural areas or areas around small cities, where there is only one or two broadband options available (if any at all), but plenty of empty space that can be traversed by 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz links. Equipment for that sort of thing is pretty cheap, and I have even heard of people using DD-WRT on "consumer" routers to create repeaters (staying within FCC limits may be tough here; I am not entirely clear on whether or not it is legal to connect some cheap Netgear router to a 24dBi antenna, even if you take the time to measure power levels and such).
Nothing stops anyone from setting up a small-scale wireless ISP -- you can use 802.11a/b/g/n/y at a relatively low cost (compared to fiber/cable hardlines/etc.), and create a new, uncensored network. Get some high gain antennas and repeaters for point-to-point wireless backhaul links, and you could work your way toward a large city with many ISPs to choose from (or perhaps toward an industrial area). You could peer with similar efforts in your region, and eventually form a regional network that is beyond the reach of the big ISPs.
I am aware of a few efforts like the above in the mountains around where I live; it is a bit of work, but really not as much as you might expect. The biggest obstacles are forests, which attenuate the signal, and animals, which occasionally knock down antennas. It is harder to do this in crowded urban areas, but there are many millions of people who do not live in cities.
What defines the Internet is its protocol -- one common protocol that allows people to communicate across various networks and networking technologies. That is why the Internet can always route around censorship: anyone can establish a net network and attach it to the Internet (though in practice, by the time things got bad enough to motivate people to do such a thing, it would be far too difficult to create a network free from censorship; see: China).
Universities exist to educate students, and I would say that the idea of a university censoring anything, including what websites its students can access, is antithetical to that -- and it should be unthinkable. If malware is a concern, just disconnect infected systems from the network and refuse to assign them IP addresses until the issue is resolved.
It is not so much that I want a massive expansion; I would prefer a law based on affirmative defense, where the defendant could explain to the court that there was a good/excusable reason for the crime, or that the crime was committed out desperation (e.g. breaking into someone's home because your children are starving and you have not been able to find a job should receive a less severe sentence than breaking into someone's home for some other reason; hate crimes laws take the opposite approach, that certain crimes are more severely punished). Note that affirmative defense is not unheard of; killing someone to save your own life is an affirmative defense, even though killing would generally be prosecuted as murder or manslaughter. If that is not something that can happen, if instead we would prefer sentencing enhancements for hate-motivated crimes, then let the law be written in a way that requires the prosecution show that the crime was committed as an expression of hatred -- regardless of the reason for the hatred.
The problem I have with the law as it exists right now is that it selects particular victim groups as "favored," while completely ignoring others. In general, this is how society has come to view discrimination; elsewhere I gave the example of a common slur, "gypped," which nobody seems to even blink at, while the very similar slur "Jewed" seems to be frowned upon, and a slur like "nigged" seems to be unthinkable. Why should any of these slurs be more acceptable than the others? The problem is that we have listed particular groups (Jews, black people, homosexuals) as being "victim groups," while other groups (gypsies, homeless people, nerds) are still "fair game." Unfortunately, the law has come to reflect this sort of thinking, although with a little less tolerance for discrimination (you can be charged with a hate crime for beating up gypsies, because they are an ethnic group).
The narrowest and most specific law would be one that does not even attempt to probe a person's state of mind when a crime was committed. You beat someone up; it does not matter whether you did it because they are a member of a particular group, because you want to send a message to a rival gang, because you were drunk, or any other reason. Most people would find that to be too narrow, and would rather broaden the law so that beating someone up because of a drug-induced psychosis is not lumped together with beating someone up because they are a black man dating a white woman. I agree that it is too narrow; as I said, I would prefer a framework based on affirmative defense, where the prosecution only needs to prove that you committed a crime, and the defense can opt to prove that the crime was committed for an acceptable or less heinous reason if there is no room for reasonable doubt, for a lesser sentence.
Now, in general, I am a fan of reducing prison terms and focusing more on punishments based on fines, community service, and so forth. Prison is a money sink, versus community service which increases the wealth of society. It is a fine line, of course, between community service and slavery, which is where we must be careful; however, I would prefer to walk that line than to try to navigate the line between prison-based punishment and an Orwellian nightmare (about which the US system already raises questions -- we have more prisoners than any other country, and the private prison industry is continuing to grow).
Legislators sit around and spend a lot of time carefully coming up with the list
No, lobbyists with the support of the media pressure politicians to include the group they represent on the list, in a way that appears to be politically neutral. That is why nerds do not appear on the list, why homeless people appear only on some state lists, etc. These are politically motivated lists, not carefully planned efforts at protecting society from itself.
"Do you see WoW "nerds" getting special protection from bullying, the way homosexuals do?"
Yes.
Where do you live? Here in the United States, hate crimes are defined as crimes motivated by particular categories -- race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc. Being a "nerd" of any sort is not in that category.
I'm honestly curious, do you think that Western criminal jurisprudence should discard the foundational notion of intent in the definition and prosecution of crime?
How about applying it equally? We do not -- hate crimes legislation defines particular categories of hatred that receive sentencing enhancement, and in practice even those categories are only selectively considered. Which particular victim groups receive this special protection depends on which particular groups can get enough lobbying power and media backing. If courts were applying the "if it is motivated by hatred, then increase the sentence" standard fairly, there would only be an argument about whether or not killing someone for being a nerd is a worse crime than killing a defenseless old woman because you wanted her jewelry.
If it were just a matter of "well this guy really hated this other person for being $XYZ," then we would not have amended the law in 2009 to include sexual orientation as a factor.
Unless you are talking about a group that is not covered by hate crimes legislation. Hate crimes legislation does not cover "nerds," even though there are plenty of cases of "nerds" being harassed and subjected to endless verbal abuse for no reason other than that they belong to a particular group. Hate crimes legislation defines particular forms of hatred as being worse than others, and the definition is expanded whenever a powerful political movement, with media backing, steps in to push for such expansion.
Blacks beating up a white should be treated just as harshly as vice versa
Just like non-nerds beating up nerds. The crime is beating someone up; what difference does it make if it was motivated by hatred of a person's race as opposed to their lifestyle, hair color, academic success, or any of dozens of other reasons that people beat each other up? The problem with hate crimes legislation is that it unfairly labels some forms of hatred as being categorically worse than others, and that this labeling is almost always politically motivated.
Actually, many of us nerds were bullied in school. I, for one, was bullied and appreciate hearing society put some pressure on bullies. This very egregious example of bullying deserves the light of day.
Perhaps you should lobby for an expansion of hate crimes laws, so that they cover "nerds" as well.
One of those deserves just having the cops splitting them up and the other jailtime.
Really? Why does one deserve jailtime and the other does not? Why do only some victimized groups get this special protection? Do you see WoW "nerds" getting special protection from bullying, the way homosexuals do?
Hate crimes laws are another way to increase our prison population, without being as overt as the war on drugs. The pattern is familiar: first, the media lets everyone know about the terrible things being done to some particular group; then people lobby for that group to be included in hate crimes laws, with the media pointing to the progress being made by such lobbying; then the laws are amended so that another group receive this special protection. Meanwhile, society goes on victimizing other groups, using various slurs and expressions, and ignoring their plight -- people say they were "gypped" all the time, but nobody bats an eye at it (now imagine if someone said they were "nigged").
Now homosexuals are the victim group de jour, and in 20 years it will be another group. The great thing is that the media can actually seed hatred for a group, then return decades later to talk about the plight of that group (sometimes without even stopping their own encouragement of the hate). While the media was trumpeting the progress of laws to protect black people, it was simultaneously stoking the flames of fear and hatred by portraying black men as dangerous criminals. The media keeps telling us that we should respect homosexuals and treat them like everyone else...and then portrays gay men as particularly effeminate or somehow not being as masculine as straight men.
If you dare question the special legal treatment of homosexuals, you are a homophobe -- and in a particularly ironic twist, you might be accused of being a closet homosexual (by the same people telling you not to harass people for being gay). Naturally, the opinion of a homophobe on these topics is totally irrelevant, whereas the opinions of someone arguing to lock homophobes in prison for long periods of time are important to the conversation.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem here. We are not addressing the problem (the victimization of particular groups), we are just expanding the size of the prison population. Hate crimes laws are worse than knee-jerk reactions: hate crimes laws have been carefully planned out.
The "great" thing about hate crimes laws is that you can never have too many of them. There are so many minorities and victimized groups out there, and we can always use the media to create new ones. The perfect way to tack a few extra years onto a prison sentence and fatten the wallets of the prison industry's investors.
These are protocols, not services
Which is what communication systems are all about: protocol. Facebook is a protocol too, in some sense, but it is one that can only enable communication on the service run by Facebook the company. Compare this to the examples I gave, in which there are well defined rules for how different services can interoperate with each other and exchanges messages.
Furthermore, nobody uses IRC or Usenet anymore
These are claims that we should try to avoid making. There are quite a few IRC and Usenet users left; take a look at Freenode, EFNet, etc., and sci.crypt, rec.radio.shortwave, sci.math, etc. Just because you do not personally use a particular system anymore does not mean that nobody else does. IRC and Usenet are also popular for downloading movies and music, which is certainly a form of communication.
Email is a different story -- you can try to host your own mail server but it's a huge PITA to set up SPF records and whatnot to keep your outgoing mail from getting bounced. You're pretty much stuck with one of a handful of email providers.
Which is still much better than the situation on Facebook, where there can be only one service provider.
More to the point, if Facebook were to suddenly change course and allow you to host your own data and provide an open, decentralized service, would you then consider using it?
I could see myself doing so. Keep in mind that there are different levels of openness; Slashdot does not exchange posts with any other system, but you do not have to register with Slashdot to read or post comments. I have also seen links to Slashdot stories posted on various forums (including Usenet), where users of those systems post their own comments; this is substantially harder to do with Facebook, where most things require a login. I would not be terribly opposed to "using" Facebook's service in the sense of visiting a URL, if I did not have to log in to do so.
I would also not be opposed to communicating with Facebook users if Facebook could interoperate with other services or systems. It would not be hard for Facebook to define a basic method of sending messages, friend requests, group memberships, and so forth through other systems.
Email: 75% spam
Might I recommend using a spam filter? I only see one or two spam messages per month...
USENET: 99% spam and zero privacy unless you run your own server
I guess that it depends on which newsgroups you are reading; I rarely see spam in sci.crypt or the other groups I read. As for privacy, I have no clue what it is that you are referring to here -- are you concerned that other people are going to read your messages in a discussion system? That is like claiming that people are going to read the messages that you post in Facebook groups or other forums.
IRC: your non-geek friends have never heard of it.
Female's all over the animal kingdom use social exclusion instead of violence in order to punish other females
Really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budgerigar#Breeding_problems
Which communication modalities aren't under the control of a monopolist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC
you're lucky if you have more than one ISP to choose from.
Except that the Internet is not controlled by that one ISP, only your connection to it. No matter how you connect to Facebook, it is a communication system that is controlled entirely by one company. That is the difference here.
Facebook is different in that the large interconnected user base is what creates the barrier to entry.
No, the fact that Facebook has made no substantial effort at being interoperable with any other system is what creates a barrier to entry.
Facebook is like most other technologies
Facebook is a technology now? That is kind of like calling Slashdot a "technology."
1) Tried it out before the privacy debacle hit the fan, then found myself held captive with Facebook flat out refusing to delete me even though I followed the 2 week removal procedure to the letter.
Sounds like a compelling reason to stay away from Facebook, to demand that your account be deleted, and to let the news media know about what they are doing.
2) Some of my friends have already been suckered in and Facebook has many communication facilities locked down to members only, so I dusted it off as the only way to stay in touch with them.
"I am not on Facebook"; if your friends refuse to talk to you because you do not use Facebook, then I would reevaluate your relationship with them. Why give in to Facebook's attempt to take control of the world's communication, especially when we have so many systems that are not controlled by any one party?
Possibly, but 1) your fellow prisoners will probably appreciate that you're "sticking it to The Man" and make it a whole lot easier on you than if you'd been convicted of possessing child porn:
You are assuming that your fellow prisoners will stop to listen to your explanation. That assumption may not withstand scrutiny:
http://www.albionmonitor.com/9707a/ac-mcdougal.html