Details On Worldwide Surveillance and Filtering 125
An anonymous reader writes "Help Net Security is running an interview with Rafal Rohozinski, a founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, which investigates, exposes and analyzes Internet filtering and surveillance practices all over the world. Rafal provides insight on the process of assessing the state of surveillance and filtering in a particular country and discusses differences related to these issues in several regions, touching especially the United States and Europe. In the US, censorship is more difficult to implement if for no other reason than the court systems offer greater protections for freedom of speech. However, in both places surveillance is on the rise particularly as law-enforcement agencies become more adept at working in the cyber domain."
Unnecessary surveillance? (Score:5, Informative)
Sit in chat rooms, forums and social networking sites trying to connect nerds and geeks in pics to real life.
The interesting part is the push for IP to home address without warrant in Canada and no court needed sneak and peek 'try before you raid' bureaucratic options.
My view is the deep fear of random flash mobs on any given topic. The more cops can just watch, the more they can build connections into protest groups.
The problem is they are still playing from the Stasi handbook.
If you have so many people willing to face jail, Iraq fresh "cops", baton charges, gassing, tasering, FIT units, Long Range Acoustic Device (L-RAD), no fly lists for life and military fusion state and federal databases, its too late
If they want control back, do a cold war USA or West Germany.
Sedate the peasants with low wage jobs, cheap cars, short cheap holidays, cheap housing, free speech for all and the dream of a better life.
If they are chasing beads and mirrors all day, no need for tanks in the streets.
Re:Nice job going for the cheap +5 (Score:5, Informative)
Both Canada and Sweden have significant restrictions on what can be said in public.
They do this is the guise of protecting against "hate speech."
Re:Oblig XKCD (Score:3, Informative)
That's a funny strip, but it doesn't really apply to mass surveillance/filtering. It's actually a lot cheaper to build a (multi-) million-dollar supercomputer to filter/analyze day to day internet traffic than to actually send goons out with $5 wrenches to beat the information out of hundreds of millions of people (on a daily basis).
Re:nor a credible citation (Score:3, Informative)
Wow.. either you're incredibly naive or you're just a trolling idiot. The point is not that people who disagreed with the Dixie Chicks refused to buy their records.. that's exactly what George W. Bush said and why everyone with a clue hung their head in shame. The point is, people who *agreed* with the Dixie Chicks were unable to buy their records or their movies or hear them on the radio or see them on tv, because the people who disagreed had arranged for them to be banned. Surely you remember all this? It really wasn't that long ago.