Protests Mount In New Zealand Against New Surveillance Laws 138
An anonymous reader writes "New revelations about Ministerial orders requiring backdoors into online services in New Zealand are fueling nationwide protests against new surveillance powers to be granted to the Government Communications Services Bureau. Speaking at one large protest meeting, Kim Dotcom described the 'Five Eyes' X-Keyscore surveillance system as 'Google for spies'. He told protesters he first noticed he was being spied on when his internet speed slowed by '20 to 30 milliseconds'. 'As a gamer, I noticed,' he said."
Re:I can tell from the pixels (Score:5, Insightful)
20-30ms would only be noticeable if you already had either borderline-high or high latency in system already. 20-30ms is well below the average human's reaction time for by visual or auditory stimulus. Kim Lardass is full of shit.
Regardless of whether human response time is 10ms, 100ms or 1000ms, if you're able to respond to events on average 30ms faster than your competitor, you're going to beat them by an average of 30ms every time.
Re:I can tell from the pixels (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you were right doesn't make you not a paranoid loon if that's the first assumption you came up with.
Funny, you must be reading a different summary; the one I see says nothing about it being "the first assumption [he] came up with," but rather that he noticed a slowdown. How do we know that he didn't subsequently verify his suspicion w/ a packet capture and trace? TFA doesn't bother to clarify the statement.
But hey, don't let that keep you from attacking a guy because of what you perceive he meant.
Protest all you want (Score:3, Insightful)
But unless you vote for different people, and vote them out when they screw up, you will accomplish nothing. They won't be spoon fed to you by mass media. You have to seek them out, and vote them in. There is no other peaceful alternative. They will have you shooting at each other while they laugh all the way to the bank. That's your global, gangster run politics in a nutshell.
Coordinated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:20-30 ms is massive (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand the point you are making, but it's not just one instant that is 20-30ms off, it's everything. You get used to the latency in gaming, and a change is enough to be noticed. Also, if you had a 50ms ping to something, that might be considered OK, where as 80ms might be considered slow. It's enough be a threshold.
Eighty Nine Percent.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Eighty Nine Percent of New Zealanders oppose new legislation to broaden the powers of the GCSB, the New Zealand Signals Intelligence agency that has tradisionally been used to spy on other countries. It is now being turned on those who fund it. However, it must be understood in the context of the countries which are working together. New Zealand is probably spying on citizens of the United States - and that information is being passed back. In fact there are no New Zealanders in the loop - the US gets direct feeds from its spy base here.
It is clear from how Assange, Snowden, KimDotcom, Swartz, Manning, David Miranda and many others have been treated that current administrations are the enemies of freedom. They are supporting a state of affairs more rrepressive and functionally more effective than George Orwells 1984. That a New Zealand Government has been complicit with this pains me.
Let us not forget that the instant that Islamic fundamentalist 'terrorists' once more become useful the US has been willing to arm them. The Syrian rebels are fundamentalists that will no doubt implement strict religious law like the Taliban should the be victorious in Syria. Is this the kind of "Freedom" the US want? The US at one point at least made a good showing of standing for something. It now makes no effort to even disguise its true position, with its clients such as the UK doing its bidding by harassing people like David Miranda in relation to the Snowden leaks. Far from protecting us from terrorists they are once more funding them.
Who will stand for freedom?
Re:I can tell from the pixels (Score:5, Insightful)
We aren't all equally likely to be surveilled. I guess if you're a 9-5er who only goes to work and the grocery store, has a wife and kids, and watches the game on sunday, you don't have much to worry about. I'll bet 15% of the people who post here are or were on some kind of elevated watchlist at some point. A little paranoia is justified. Now someone like kim dotcom is definitely justified.
I take it you've been living in a cave for the last 6 months.
If you live in or have any contact with the USA, you're 100% likely to be surveilled. They've admitted as much thanks to Snowden.
The only question is what depth the surveillance goes to. Whether it's just basic Metadata collection ("just in case") or being fed to the intelligence woodchipper. And, since so much of the mechanisms are statistically-driven, it has less to do with your innocence as it does with how well you shake out from the statistical analysis. For all you know, you're dropping off your laundry next door to an Arab charity and your GPS data triggers a flag.
Re:I can tell from the pixels (Score:4, Insightful)
or it is, and it's someones having fun at your expense