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Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

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Re: Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

#81

Post by protomyth »

RevRal wrote: post #71
anamax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the tea-bagging protesters are protesting stuff that is way over their head Oh really? You need to keep up. While the story used to be "ignorant", when folks actually looked at them, instead of relying on the US-lef "anyone who opposes me must be dumb" stereotype, they found that the Tea Party folks were, on the whole, better educated etc. Thus the new attack is that they're elitists. http://www.washingtonp…

Man, this whole tea-party thing was fairly inconsequential to the point I was trying to make. I brought it up as an example and because my parent brought it up. This was the supplement I was trying to tack onto my parent's comment: "Some technical understanding of this issue is prerequisite to understanding how the negative consequences outweigh the positive." This concerning internet privacy. And I said "tea-bagging…

first, sorry to cause you trouble

So let's say we have a process that has consequences.

If I get you right, you believe the crowd doesn't need a technical understanding of the process as long experts (people with the technical understanding) provide a dumbed-down explanation. Except in the case of internet privacy where the crowd needs a minimal technical understanding of the issue. My basic belief is that a minimal explanation of process and an explanation of the consequences of the process is enough for the crowd.

Would you say internet privacy is different from say health care because of the technical nature or because it is more abstract or......

Re: Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

#82

Post by AnneTheAgile »

protomyth wrote: post #42
ahoyhere wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate why you're touchy, but think about it: GOVT DEATH PANELS! That's all you need to know, to realize that the assessment of "semi-facts, lies, and emotion blended into an easily palatable gruel" is, in fact, the majority of Tea Party-er thinking. Not all of the people who are against socialized healthcare believe the "death panel" idiocy. Not all of them pretend they're doing some revolutionary act by joini…

Well, putting the whole bill http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3590/text on a billboard would be rather tough, so that's the sound bite that summarizes some of the believed implications of section 3403. This actually goes along with the back and forth between myself and RevRal. To have a technical understanding of the bill, you probably need to be a serious specialist lawyer (after waiting for the RFP and rule ma…

Here is a link I found. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,540965,00.html

It is well established that socialized medicine entails rationing.

Re: Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

#83

Post by yters »

hzzn wrote: post #61
tjic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can guarantee you he's a better VP than Sarah 'Drill baby drill' Palin Thanks. Your extensive footnoting and logical arguments definitely convinced me of your point of view.

(The comment I am about to make is not supported by a link to a paper published by a widely respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal. You can safely assume that it contains nothing but falsehood and moderate accordintly.) It's possible that the purpose of the comment was merely to express an opinion, and that the commenter had no intention of persuading you, or anyone else, of anything.

Right, cuz that's what we're about here at HN, just expressing opinions. We don't care about which opinions are right or wrong, we just want people to be able to express themselves and have a positive self image.

Re: Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

#84

Post by anamax »

RevRal wrote: post #71
anamax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the tea-bagging protesters are protesting stuff that is way over their head Oh really? You need to keep up. While the story used to be "ignorant", when folks actually looked at them, instead of relying on the US-lef "anyone who opposes me must be dumb" stereotype, they found that the Tea Party folks were, on the whole, better educated etc. Thus the new attack is that they're elitists. http://www.washingtonp…

Man, this whole tea-party thing was fairly inconsequential to the point I was trying to make. I brought it up as an example and because my parent brought it up. This was the supplement I was trying to tack onto my parent's comment: "Some technical understanding of this issue is prerequisite to understanding how the negative consequences outweigh the positive." This concerning internet privacy. And I said "tea-bagging…

> But my position on internet privacy is a little different. I feel that you do need a minimal technical understanding of the issue.

> Some technical understanding of this issue is prerequisite to understanding how the negative consequences outweigh the positive.

What technical understanding do you think that someone needs in this case?

I'll help - do they need to understand more than "if your mail is hosted by Yahoo, Yahoo stores it" and "if your mail is in outlook, it's on your machine or that of your employer"? Those those two pieces of information establish where your mail is stored both before and after reading.

Note that the distinction that the DoJ was trying to make, that read mail stored outside your control isn't private, is not a technical issue, but a legal one.

> And I said "tea-bagging protesters" as a quick, lazy, way to refer to a group of people.

If it had been a similar reference about a different group of people, you have been driven out as a racist.

Re: Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

#85

Post by anamax »

AnneTheAgile wrote: post #82
protomyth wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, putting the whole bill http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3590/text on a billboard would be rather tough, so that's the sound bite that summarizes some of the believed implications of section 3403. This actually goes along with the back and forth between myself and RevRal. To have a technical understanding of the bill, you probably need to be a serious specialist lawyer (after waiting for the RFP and rule ma…

Here is a link I found. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,540965,00.html It is well established that socialized medicine entails rationing.

> It is well established that socialized medicine entails rationing.

Every system entails rationing.

In a private system, your resources and your choices determine how decisions are made.

In a "public" system, govt decides. Yup - they'll take resources that you might have used for for your care and spend it on someone else and deny you care.

We already hear "we're not going to pay to care for fatties or smokers". If they're not going to get care, I think that it's wrong to take their money. That's just me.

Re: Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

#86

Post by roboneal »

ErrantX wrote: post #65
btilly wrote: post #22

What is the real difference between this and what China was trying to do to gmail? The government wants to get access to private emails of people they don't like without having to demonstrate real evidence that the person has done anything wrong. The biggest difference to my eyes is that the one targets "human rights activists who would like to bring down the government" while the other targets "terrorists". Yeah, ye…

The difference is simple. This is being hashed out in a courtroom. And has a high liklihood of not happening. :-)

Good point. However, the similarity is also just as simple - the "instincts" of our Federal government is not all that different than the Chinese Communist government.

Re: Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

#87

Post by jacoblyles »

natrius wrote: post #53
tjic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to live 15 minutes from the Capitol Building. So you lived in the imperial seat in the US, the one are where 75% of people are working for the government (directly or indirectly), and the one place that actually GREW during the current recession ... and you use that background to argue that Americans-as-a-whole are naive and love big intrusive government? You see the logical flaw here, don't you?

Capitols attract protests. I work two blocks from my state capitol, and I see more protests than I have anywhere else. I doubt the percentage of government employment is as high here, but it's still decently high. There are more variables involved than you're accounting for. I'd say your logic is more flawed than hers.

The Tea Parties, Pro-life movements, and anti-war folks regularly marched on the capitol when I lived in DC.

Re: Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

#88

Post by guelo »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #26
ytilibitapmoc wrote: post #2

If only the silence meant that people were sharpening their pitchforks. Unfortunately, this is the USA -- we would rather die by a thousand paper-cuts than stand up and say "No!"...

Obama selected Joe "I wrote the Patriot Act" Biden as his VP. This is the same Joe Biden who tried to ban Turing machines because they could be used to encrypt files that the government would be unable to crack. Plenty of people knew this, but voted for Obama anyway. For many people, "the government is violating privacy rights" is not a genuine policy position. It's just a club to beat their political opponents with.

I have no idea where you got this info but it is not true. I'm not a big Biden fan but he did not have anything to do with crafting the Patriot Act. Here, go to the Wikipedia article and do a search for Biden, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_USA_PATRIOT_Act , you'll come up empty. You will find names like Specter, Leahy, Sarbanes, Lott, Hatch, Daschel, etc. Biden did vote for it, but so did 98 of his useless colleagues. Russ Feingold was the only true patriot in the senate.

Re: Obama administration wanted warrantless access rights to most US email

#89

Post by korch »

korch wrote: post #79

So it's probably time to pull all my email out of Gmail and onto my own email server. At least the gov't hasn't yet routed around that basic personal liberty and property right. Surely many geeks will be moving away from freemium webmail that's wide open to the gov't, but where will they be going? Does anyone know of a good open-source Gmail front-end clone? If somehow this doesn't exist, open-source developers unite…

It's also relevant to understand how we got here, a read a little history to avoid repeating it. An oldie but goodie: The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

The book is about the incident where the Feds first raised the legal issue of reading anyone's email without a warrant, and in a way it became the war that launched a thousand Internet legal advocacy organizations; which is where we are right now.

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