3 Reasons To Hate Mass Surveillance; 3 Ways To Fight It 120
This site's "Your Rights Online" section, sadly, has never suffered for material. The revelations we've seen over the last year-and-change, though, of widespread spying on U.S. citizens, government spying in the E.U. on international conferences, the UK's use of malware against citizens, and the use of modern technology to oppress government protesters in the middle east and elsewhere shows how persistent it is. It's been a banner year on that front, and the banner says "You are being spied on, online and off." A broad coalition of organizations is calling today "The Day We Fight Back" against the growing culture of heads-they-win, tails-you-lose surveillance, but all involved know this is not a one-day struggle. (Read more, below.)
THREE REASONS TO HATE MASS SURVEILLANCE: 1) Because the Internet is nearly everywhere, it means the spying it makes possible has spread to match its footprint. 30 years ago, "on the internet" really was novel, because the public Internet simply wasn't. There were a few big military and academic sites around the world, and the concepts that make today's internet work were already embodied in running systems, but there was little reason for individuals to care about privacy invasion, or having their systems crippled by government malware, because their systems and their privacy weren't at issue. There wasn't a World Wide Web as a portal to nearly every resource online, no "Cloud," and no Blue Coat. Now, not only can individuals get on the internet, but the meaning of that phrase has moved, fast, over the last decade: now, getting on the internet is just a fact of modern life, a banal, automated background fact of the way we stay in touch with friends, deal with bills, find entertainment, get directions, and work. Online surveillance of all the signals we emit and receive (over home internet links, over cellular networks, on landline telephones, even on postcards) might be minimized and waved away as the collection of "mere" metadata, but in reality, if you're reading these words online, and even if you're doing your best to read them anonymously, it means you've almost certainly got a collection of data about you online already.
2) Because "online surveillance" is a slippery slope, and it will only get slipperier. Remember the Clipper chip's hardware-based encryption escrow scheme? Who and how often you email, chat with online, or call on the phone is the tip of the iceberg. Robert Bork didn't like having his video watching habits spied on, and that was before Netflix and competitors made the sorting and stacking of movie-watching habits not only possible but an never-ending exercise in deep data analysis. Maybe you don't care in particular about what the NSA, FBI, or anyone else thinks of your taste in entertainment, but you might prefer them to stay out not only of the information revealed by your current online activity, but also out of whatever things are revealed by future developments. Right now, a relatively small part of the online population uses crypto-currency like Bitcoin; a decade from now, it seems likely to be even more widespread than Netflix is today. Do you want your transactions to be public record, or even public-servant record? Beyond that, the era of ubiquitous, automated surveillance doesn't need you to mail an angry letter, or declare allegiance to an unpopular cause online: Just walking around means sooner rather than later you're likely to be captured on camera.
Access to your medical records almost certainly will be online, too, even more than it already is. Online and offline lives will only get blurrier: Your GPS (and increasingly, that means your phone, too) knows where you've been, and your should-be-private Google Maps page knows where you might have considered going. (Couple that with the cavalier attitude that dominates rules about data that you carry in your phone, laptop or USB data sticks, if you cross, or even come near, the U.S. border.) Think about the meta-data (or what the government might characterize that way) that your reading and viewing habits, your prescription medicine needs, your airline tickets, and your Amazon wishlist could reveal, and whether you'd want everyone's digital dossier to be up for ad-hoc scrutiny in 10 years any more than it already is. You don't want the equivalent of the TSA viewing rooms (for your own good, of course) attached to every stream of online communication.
3) Because you're paying for it. How much you're paying is hard to say, because of black budgets, overlapping programs, and the sheer number of systems that are or could be used to make widespread surveillance the new normal, but the mystery price tag starts out high. If you're an American, or an EU citizen, at least you can be grateful that you're likely only being spied on, rather than actively harmed in other ways; in other countries, the outcome can be far grimmer. How much do you want to pay to build an infrastructure for constantly surveilling yourself, your friends, and your family? Especially one that fails so miserably at even its stated aims?
THREE WAYS TO FIGHT IT:
The good news is, while you can't stop the entire octopus, you're not required to be a full-time victim of online surveillance or the offline surveillance that it seems to normalize. Instead, you can take some simple steps that at least fog the glass a bit. Readers will no doubt suggest better technologies and practices, but here's a short list to start with:
1) Encryption, more often and in more contexts. Encrypted hard drives are now easy to buy off the shelf, or to implement with software per-user. Use encryption when it makes sense, for documents, emails, file systems, or browsing; the more you do, the more normal this becomes — if it's perfectly normal to carry data encrypted, no matter how innocuous, it's hard for merely possessing encrypted data to be vilified. TrueCrypt might not be impregnable, but neither are the opaque envelopes you might put in a physical mailbox: making it harder to spy on you even in small ways beats indifference. Good news: not every layer of security takes much effort for you to take advantage of: Mozilla's move to HTTPS Everywhere is an example, as is the option that many OSes are embracing to offer the user full-disk or per-directory encryption.
2) Avoid standing in front of the biggest targets. If you don't yet, use an operating system like Linux or one of the modern BSDs, at least part of the time. The SCADA vulnerabilities exploited to cripple a key part of Iran's nuclear program exploited a well-known hole in a widespread operating system, and the same can be said of many attacks blandly characterized as "Advanced Persistent Threats." Even a cheap, adjunct laptop running an up-to-date Linux or OpenBSD could make you safer for some tasks online; cheaper yet, you can run an entire Linux system from a USB drive, and yank it when you're through. That doesn't stop a mid-stream listener (which is a very hard problem), but a compartmentalized system like that means you can do your online banking or anything else and be less vulnerable to common malware. (Besides, it's fun!)
3) Tell companies, politicians (for instance, by voting for or against), and the people around you, that you object to being spied on. You can't prevent malicious individuals, governments, (or Google, or Yelp, or your Facebook friends) from looking at some of the data that you emit; you might feel perfectly satisfied with lots of the transactions you take part in freely. But you can minimize the worst consequences by being mindful of what you do or don't mind putting out there, and spreading the word when you find abuses of trust that compromise your privacy.
Online spying didn't pop into existence with Edward Snowden's revelations about mass data gathering by the NSA on U.S. citizens. For Americans, having our communications tapped by government agents (even if by a government that has remained far more benign than have many others) extends as long as the history of the country; likewise for Europeans and others all over the world. It's much easier, now, though, for those agents to put an ear to your wall or an eye on your correspondence than it's ever been before. For those in many countries, taking practical steps to reduce your exposure is a sensible move for more than just aesthetic or philosophical reasons, though, and luckily the range of options for preserving privacy and private communications have advanced right along with the growth of the technologies that threaten them.
TMN (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm running the firefox plugin TrackMeNot which periodically runs random google queries with keywords like: "building bombs", "terrorist attacks", "nitroglycerine" ...
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Sign onto the "List" (Score:2)
I thought that was the idea; Make 'em track my every move, since I'm doing fuck all to actually fight the bastards.
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Could rename that the Michael Hastings plugin, some words can get you killed.
http://nymag.com/news/features... [nymag.com]
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It worked in the 1960's, but it is unlikely to work now.
They can detect the "random" activity, and isolate it. You are not making the right fog, and they have ways to see through it.
A better way would be some protocol that works like bitcoins to share someone elses anonymized queries, and makes you look exactly like them for a little while, then switches it up. They might "poison the well" but if even a medium sample of people is using the method, it will make a fog that makes automated clustering and cla
Re:TMN (Score:4, Interesting)
They can detect the "random" activity, and isolate it
Theoretically, but in reality, anything that looks too suspicious has to be investigated. Otherwise, if someone who actually wanted to build a bomb knew that fake data was discarded, they just run 10,000 random queries in the exact same manor as the few real ones they need and easily hide their intent. Or consider after a terrorism indecent, the report on why some beyond-obvious activity wasn't caught, "Well, they looked too much like terrorists, like they were some caricature perpetrated by someone trying to troll us so we ignored it."
Also, I know for a fact that once you check so many boxes, They have to come do an investigation. My random e-mailer pissed off the secret service right after 9-11*. Though in that case, my service provider passed on the unusual activity when they noticed I got their domain blacklisted by Yahoo for spam email; I wasn't caught by NSA spying.
The question you would be asking anywhere but slashdot would be: "why did you do that?" And the answer would be: in a course I was taking at college, internet monitoring came up, and I single handedly argued against the whole class and teacher that They would not show up for a few emails with the word bomb. So I went home to prove the class wrong and maybe the class was kinda right.
Your idea sounds really cool, kinda like what TOR does but more-so. I just wanted to point out that random activity does get noticed. Your welcome to try your own experiments though!
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Nothing is random. Humans are crap at random. Makes me wonder why we think we are intelligent. We are good clocks - that makes our thought mechanistic.
We are consistent. So the "get someone elses version of normal and play it yourself" is really a good way to hide. When tested against computers which make okay random, or some advanced/expensive stuff that makes actual random this approach makes us look nearly exactly like a real human.
Instead of looking like a needle in a haystack - and needles look no
Why do I get the feeling that (Score:2)
certain groups which are used to be under constant surveillance are going to become the future's subject matter experts on the subject.
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Minorities and poor people?
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organized crime groups
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Based on some evidence the big dogs of old school organized crime
decided instead of fighting the government they could puppeteer the
government and that has been going on for decades in multiple nations
that "falsely believe that they are free".
Watch the film "Hacking Democracy"
None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their ey
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Were thought to be
,
....Surely, you jest.
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Maybe it got rolled into the secret patriot act....
http://www.wired.com/dangerroo... [wired.com]
Amazed the man hasn't had his Mercedes explode like Michael Hastings,
oh wait he doesn't own a Mercedes he will be fine. (/sarcasm)
HTTPS Everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
And develop a long term strategy to put crypto in all comms - e.g. use response headers from servers to push requests over to https where they are supported. Better yet produce an https+ which allows sites to use unsigned keys, CA signed keys, or even web of trust signed keys and present that info to the user in a meaningful way. Get rid of the CA tax and there would be far less reason for sites to use plain http any more.
Re:HTTPS Everywhere (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't Apache just generate a cert when it installs and sites can go off and use that? Ah you might say, it doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks. But it's still better than plain text and it's still sufficient for many sites that want crypto to be on by default. And browsers could store the fingerprint of the cert if they wished and add-ons like HTTPS Everywhere could collate these fingerprints to look for attacks (they already implement this in something called the SSL observatory).
AND it wouldn't stop certs being signed if users wished. For some people, a CA may still be a meaningless signatory and it has its own security problems. Why can't the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft hold a key signing party? Would you trust Amazon's signature more if it was signed by Google? I would. And it would be hard to forge certs because there could be multiple signatories and each signatory could have their own. That's a web of trust and scales.
CAs can still be signatories in a web of trust but the existing model where certs MUST have a single CA signature is broken.
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Re:HTTPS Everywhere (Score:4, Interesting)
The crypto weenies over on metzdowd.com seem to think HTTPS is currently a badly broken security layer that gives users a false sense of security. There are a number of suggested fixes, however.
My own pet peeve is that we don't even protect our passwords properly. My ssh id_rsa password protection is a joke: literally a single round of MD5 by default. My TrueCrypt password is protected a bit better, but with custom ASICs, a thousand rounds or so of SHA-256 runs so fast it's not even a significant part of the password guessing latency. I got so POed over this issue ,that I've submitted my own password hashing entry in the Password Hashing Competition [password-hashing.net]. Fortunately, there are guys way smarter than me working on this specific problem, and in a couple of years we should have a far better password protection solution. In the meantime, someone should do friendly forks of TrueCrypt and OpenSSL and incorporate Scrypt as the default password hash for user-land encryption (as opposed to servers that may have to run thousands of hashes per second).
The advice to use more encryption seems sounds, but most of us geeks here on slashdot don't even know how weak our own password security really is.
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When they own the firmware, they basically own the box.
http://www.extremetech.com/com... [extremetech.com]
And don't blame the chinese, they were paid to put it there for you can guess who...
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Wouldn't it be funny if some of the corporations involved with OpenBIOS
are there to sneak in a stealthier version of Rakshasa ?
http://www.openfirmware.info/W... [openfirmware.info]
But, This is Slashdot. (Score:5, Interesting)
This just isn't news for the folks who read here regularly.
Reaching Joe Six Pack is what this comes down to, and the cynic in me says that ship has already sailed.
Re:But, This is Slashdot. (Score:5, Interesting)
Reaching Joe Six Pack is what this comes down to, and the cynic in me says that ship has already sailed.
The trick is to word your platform in such a way that Joe Six Pack has an immediate and extreme emotional reaction, which will cause him to demand knee-jerk legislation to address the issue.
At least, that's how politicians manipulate people into supporting causes; high time we fight fire with fire.
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You mean "The government follows your every step, it is getting worse than the commies ever were" doesn't work anymore? Because that's pretty much the message of today.
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You mean "The government follows your every step, it is getting worse than the commies ever were" doesn't work anymore? Because that's pretty much the message of today.
Considering the average American thinks commies just get free hand outs from the government, I don't think that works anymore.
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Investment banks are commies now?
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Well problem with trying to solve it via the government is they are the problem.
Its a bit like asking the fox to fix the hen house.
Re:But, This is Slashdot. (Score:4, Interesting)
Joe Six Pack, who is most of the nation, doesn't care. He doesn't care if the government is listening to his phone calls or spying on his email because it doesn't affect his ability to put food on the table or a roof over his head or provide for his kids or pay for his car to get to work or pay his bills in retirement. Joe Six Pack thinks government collection of "metadata" is over his head and doesn't give two shits about it.
Joe Six Pack believes in having his gun. Let the government listen to his phone calls, but if he tries to take away his ability to defend himself, they should plan for return fire. Joe Six Pack believes in low taxes and less government intrusion, because the government sucks at just about everything.
Joe Six Pack believes in tangible threats to his person, his family, and his ability to make something for himself. Government surveillance of his phone call to check up on his mom is not tangible. This is an issue for the minority of tech people trying to do things under the government radar; it doesn't concern Joe Six Pack.
At some point Slashdot readers need to realize that in the standard distribution of American citizens and their values, Slashdot readers are not the median. They are the left tail end. The median folks don't care much about the values that you all think are universal, and as proponents of those values most Slashdot readers do a pretty poor job of communicating to the median of folks and convincing them of the importance of these issues.
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Joe Six Pack believes in having his gun.
Yeah, isn't it funny how some people pretend to care about the constitution and rights, but actually only care about the 2nd amendment? Isn't it funny how people can be so profoundly ignorant as to believe that mass government surveillance is unimportant or even acceptable?
"The government is 100% incompetent and often malicious, but hey, why not let them spy on my communications? What could go wrong!?"
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Joe Six Pack believes in having his gun.
Yeah, isn't it funny how some people pretend to care about the constitution and rights, but actually only care about the 2nd amendment? Isn't it funny how people can be so profoundly ignorant as to believe that mass government surveillance is unimportant or even acceptable?
"The government is 100% incompetent and often malicious, but hey, why not let them spy on my communications? What could go wrong!?"
I find it funny people think the other way. Gun rights are a Constitutional right; clearly defined. Collection of meta-data on the internet which is semi-public is not so clear. And yet those opposed to government surveillance seem to be very ant-gun rights, anti-NRA etc.
But I find your post pointless because you divert from the point, ask a question and then fail to answer it. Why is mass government surveillance important or unacceptable? Why should it be important to, say, a 65 year old retiree who u
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Why is mass government surveillance important or unacceptable? Why should it be important to, say, a 65 year old retiree who uses the internet to see pictures of their grandkids on Facebook, occasional internet research about knitting or woodcrafting, and emailing their other retired friends to meet up?
Why is it so important to the government that they collect all available online and phone information about this 65 year old retiree in the first place?
We disagree about the constitutionality of mass government surveillance. There is no point to collecting the massive amount of data the government is collecting unless they are planning to use it. Right? Otherwise, it's just a big waste of time and money. The only practical way to use such a large amount of data is to perform a search against it, looking fo
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Your points are well made and well taken. Rest assured they do not fall on deaf ears. Please allow me to respond.
1). As you seem very knowledgeable about the legal justifications for mass surveillance, you are almost certainly aware that there are opposing legal opinions regarding the constitutionality of these programs. Federal judge Richard Leon, for instance, ruled that mass data collection was "likely unconstitutional" and expressed doubt regarding the central rationale for the program - that it is nece
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Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." [laughter] ”
—Henry Kissinger, United States Secretary of State, (March 10, 1975)[9][10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What most ppl don't get is who Kissinger reports to outside the government.
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If you are going to make blanket statements about people on this topic, I would suggest you point over to the actual "apathy" crowd as not c
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This is demonstrated in thi
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Yet people tolerate the TSA, unfettered border searches, free speech zones, DUI checkpoints, stop-and-frisk, etc. All of those things affect people in the physical world, and yet nothing much is done about them. I would honestly like it if lots of people actually cared about freedom and the constitution, but that sadly does not seem to be the case.
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Well said, because when the 1st amendment is hijacked and circumvented as somethings might indicate
then you start running out of amendments rather quickly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Why not have favorite parts of the Constitution to care about? Personally, I'm not all that fond of the 2nd Amendment, but I'm even less fond of seeing Constitutional rights eroded, so I'm not a fan of gun control. Were there no Constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms, I might well be a gun control supporter.
Re:But, This is Slashdot. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, use Joe Sixpack as your shield. As long as they get data from him, they are complacent and satisfied that they get enough data. Educate Joe Sixpack and the stream of data will dwindle to a trickle and they'll start using more invasive means to gather data.
Sorry to say it, but the days when I try to educate the masses are over. I use them as a shield for my privacy nowadays.
The problem with blankt surveylance (Score:3)
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Can anyone tell me when organized crime and money laundering fell out of the 4-horsemen-the-sky-is-falling [wikipedia.org] scare?
Probably when they started to run the show, it's simply no fun pointing at yourself when trying to find a strawman...
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Well as for money laundering, apparently it gets a pass if you have bribed the right ppl.
http://www.democraticundergrou... [democratic...ground.com]
Mass connection leads to mass surveillance, cannot (Score:1)
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Yes, how horrible it would be if some country was left behind and didn't violate the rights of its citizens in the same way as the other countries! Get with the times, guys!
Re: Mass connection leads to mass surveillance, ca (Score:1)
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If capitalism worked, we'd see a country spring up and declare that it will NOT spy on its citizens and people with some brain would flock there.
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If (x)-ism worked we'd see....etc etc....
The fact is the plutocrats, oligarches, kleptocrats, and other parasites and looters
always worm their way into any government and subvert it and compromise
the people and the process.
This has been a generational thing where the families pass on these tricks
to their offspring, and they are societal leeches that bleed the workign class dry
over and over for centuries.
Google the term "Robber Baron", and you get an idea of whom I am speaking.
In the realm of political pirac
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Sometimes I think these round table groups get together and break open Orwell, Huxley,
and others and use them like a operating manual on how to puppeteer the governments.
Verified Threat? (Score:3)
So, clicking on that 'learn more' link at the top of the page puts Trend Micro into an uproar that "yourbrowser.net" is:
Details: Verified fraud page or threat source
Suspected fraud page or threat source
Associated with spam or possibly compromised
Rating in progress. Trend Micro Web Reputation is currently set to block pages that have not been checked for safety.
Irony, or on purpose?
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So, clicking on that 'learn more' link at the top of the page puts Trend Micro into an uproar that "yourbrowser.net" is:
What'ss trend micro, preciousss?
Yeah, benign right now... (Score:2)
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Yeah the U.S. is relatively benign right now, butt, let the economy go south...
Well, let it indeed.... Australia and NZ economies could do with a bit of boost.
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Yeah at times it looks like they follow Orwell and Huxley like a playbook.
One of their best old tricks is Divide and Rule, where you get half of the
population mad at the other half and whip them into a frenzy with
broadsheets in the old days, and the "Project Mockingbird" media
in the modern day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The best way to keep the public from being mad at the plutocrats
is give them a different bone to chew on and that is the fake political
process that is totally rigged, just like the con
I'm going to put a big dent in this (Score:2)
It will get me on the naughty list, but that's a price I'll pay gladly. That's all for now.
Where's the banner? (Score:2)
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Indoor plumbing means I don't have to go into the freezing cold to shit into a smelly hole. Electrification means that my computer world and I have safe lighting during the night.
Care to educate me on the benefit I have from mass surveillance?
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Mass surveillance infringes upon your fundamental and constitutional rights. To some people, that qualifies as a benefit.
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Care to educate me on the benefit I have from mass surveillance?
Well, if you're a spy, or sell them their tools, the sky's the limit.
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Let's assume for a moment that I'm not a crook.
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Well, then I guess you're up a tree without a paddle. The world is run by crooks. Charismatic, yes, but they are still crooks.
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Care to educate me on the benefit I have from mass surveillance?
It's easier than ever to frame people you don't like.
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It's also easier than ever to be framed by people who don't like you.
Re:Laudable but futile...; Moving towards health (Score:2)
"Mass surveillance is inevitable to any industrialized country. Which is why all countries with any technological sophistication have it. To think that one can 'fight' it to any real degree is like thinking one can 'fight' indoor plumbing or mass electrification."
Sad, but true. Still, political plays a role in the outcome of all this in terms of what sort of world we want to build together.
Recent posts by me to slashdot on that referencing other items:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/com [slashdot.org]
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"What will work is broad social change done through democratic processes."
Watch the film "Hacking Democracy" and then tell me how its going to work.
Democracy is an illusion in most of the nations of the world.
Its there to give ppl the illusion of choice, you have no choice, you have owners. ~ George Carlin.
Information overload (Score:2)
Information overload actually makes it easy for the clever people to slip through the cracks unobserved.
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Actually they merely keep a file on you, and they are glad that you break there rules
because if you ever become a problem for one of their pet projects then out comes
your file and you get a visit from them.
I don't agree with everything Ms. Rand said, but this one fits...
“There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it
becomes
I need to be given reasons to hate it? (Score:2)
Re:We Won't Win by Yelling (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a statistician. And from the data I have at hand from our "war on terror" so far, I can only say that the threat from false positives is higher than the threat from false negatives.
Or, bluntly, if we didn't "fight terror", we'd have less to fear.
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We're making enough errors, no need to declare war on them to make them multiply.
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For the anti-surveillance advocates who are enjoying the rise of their viewpoint in the polls, consider this: a single terrorist attack on U.S. soil could easily tilt the polls the other way and land us in a worse surveillance state than we have now. Be careful what you ask for.
Probably always going to be true, and there really isn't much to be done. Funny how people in "the land of the free and the home of the brave" don't want to be free or brave if they believe not being those things will keep them safe.
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Besides Divide and Rule, the False Flag is a favorite tactic of governments,
that and lying to the public.
Google "USS Liberty" check all the articles on that, Google "Terrence Yeakey"
and check all the articles on that.
After you take a deep look at what's going on you start to realize what
really happened to Michael Hastings and Pat Tillman.
They were silenced.
February 11th, 2014 is The Day We Fight Back again (Score:2)
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The plutocrats, oligarchs, and kleptocrats are shaking in their boots because you
gave them a list of names that are their enemies, roflmao.
TOR (Score:2)
I'm very surprised to see that the article and all posts fail to mention TOR.
TOR may not be perfect, but it's a lot better than any readily available alternative. I'd suggest using it for any browsing you think might be the least bit controversial. The more people that use TOR, the better it works. It's a bit slow, but it's livable.
http://www.torproject.org/ [torproject.org]
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You're not "safe" under any circumstances, offline or online.
TOR is a hard target, and unless there's some reason to go after you individually already, you'll almost certainly be secure using it. The TOR developers are constantly working to make it better as well.
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This is correct, also almost all hardware is hacking you from the inside out.
http://www.extremetech.com/com... [extremetech.com]
And again, don't blame the chinese, they were paid to put it in there.
Now when they used the fake chips in the cisco routers for the DoD,
that is a very different can of worms.
Boomerang (Score:3)
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As far as security goes I would not be shocked if more intense spying is not applied to individuals who take precautions against being spied upon.
The solution for that is strong encryption for everyone, transparently, and by default.
The things I most want kept private the governemt already knows about - my identifying information, drivers' license info, social security number, tax records, bank account numbers, etc. The things you can use to steal my identity and/or money. When I use encryption it is to keep that information from criminals, and it is entirely rational to do so.
The day the government decides the use of security tools is only to hide b
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Sounds like chunks of themes ripped from the Fourth Realm series by John Twelve Hawks. Being off the grid is one thing, but also randomizing your choices helps another. Working with maps of CCTV to find alternative routes, and providing the double work of having 'usable' profiles to hide behind.
http://www.mediaeater.com/came... [mediaeater.com]
http://www.fastcoexist.com/168... [fastcoexist.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Just everybody behave slightly more suspiciously (Score:2)
Figure out what can alert the watchers without getting into trouble, and compare notes and discuss in forums on Tinternet.
Make sport out of the watchers by seeing what you can figure out about them simply by provoking unnecessary reactions.
Read The Art of War and study Tai Chi (properly, not just as a spaced-out eastern arm-waving exercise, but as the study of super-efficient movement and coordination -- though that can take a decade or so just to get the basics half-right).
HTTPS won't stop it (Score:1)
The thing you civilians don't get is we backdoored the basic encryption protocols a long long time ago.
And, as you're now finding out, we have been watching.
There are five NSA sites in North America, btw. Not two.
Re: (Score:1)
You forgot we also have literal circuits in the chipsets. You'd be surprised.
Those arguments (Score:1)
I'm not sure how #1 is a reason. The pervasiveness of the internet is not in itself a problem, any more than air being everywhere is a problem. Show me how the pervasiveness is an issue.
# 2 is weak; it talks about what could happen, rather than what is likely to happen. I understand that when arguing against something, if the outcome of letting that thing happen is catastrophic, that will determine how convincing the argument is, but I prefer to look at
By coincidence, today's FOIA gem (Score:2)
Just tripped over this -- scroll down past the initial paperwork. You may recognise the site.
http://www.theblackvault.com/d... [theblackvault.com]
Re: (Score:2)
TRUSTe = InQtel = CIA ... or so rumor has it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In 2002, Wired Magazine questioned whether TrustE could be trusted, noting that rather than revoking privacy seals for violations, "Truste officials often seemed to be covering for their clients".[23]
In 2008, a Galexia Consulting study reported that TrustE had terminated only one customer for non-compliance in the previous eleven years, despite a number of significant privacy violations which had received press coverage. "The mo