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Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

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Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#371

Post by loup-vaillant »

halr9000 wrote: post #367
dredmorbius wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've already given a literal life-or-death example above, which didn't involve guns. Strategems in which individuals are denied the very fundamentals of life, food, shelter, work, engagement in civic, social, commercial, or cultural practices, access to courts, institutions, and the like, without overt threats of violence, are far more effective than guns. to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excel…

Your life or death scenario is an edge case with its own special complexities which should not be lumped in with discussions of the vastly voluntary choices we can make. Healthcare is heavily regulated as we all know. This raises the barrier to entry to new competitors, and leads to a less dynamic market where the status quo can last a long long time. So you end up with only 1 or a very small number of medical device…

Okay, let's try a concrete example: Gmail. Let us agree that the point of Gmail is to read people's email so it can send targeted adds. That automating the process (since human employees don't directly read that email) makes the thing more efficient, and thus worse, as well as easier to misuse.

Let us agree that I can indeed avoid having a Gmail account. Can I realistically avoid sending email to a Gmail user?

Nope.

There are just too many users. Maybe I can avoid sending mail to @gmail.com (though not responding to one will invariably be perceived as incredibly rude), but I cannot avoid having Gmail users send email to me. I cannot realistically notice ahead of time that john.doe@example.com is actually using a Gmail server under the hood, and not send the email. I cannot prevent Gmail users from talking about me.

I can reduce my exposure, but there are limits to what I can reasonably do. Your usage of Gmail is hurting my privacy. Okay, not yours, but definitely half of my friend's. I can't realistically ask them to either stop using Gmail, or stop interacting with me, now can I?

Let us agree that individual choices and individual actions don't work.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#372

Post by jascii »

snowden_report wrote: post #364
Bartweiss wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon page blurb aside, I don't understand why this question comes up so often. Even during the initial revelations, people who wanted to downplay the topic regularly pointed out that Snowden was "just a system administrator, not an intelligence agent" and attempted to debate whether he worked directly for the government or only for a contractor. It baffled me, because that doesn't even seem relevant to his claims.…

That's an excellent point. Using the "only a sys admin" example was pretty weak. I just chose it quickly as one example of his trustworthiness level from the report. A better example would be that Mr. Snowden claims he began collecting files after James Clapper's testimony, but in fact he began 8 months earlier (third point in the Executive Summary, page iii). My main takeaway form the report is that Mr. Snowden was…

As far as I know, none of the documents leaked by Mr Snowden have been found untrustworthy or fabricated. Digging in his past for inconsistencies and speculating about his motivation seem little more then a weak attempt at character assassination. What exactly are your goals in this discussion?

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#373

Post by autoexec »

jonfw wrote: post #328
mindslight wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply asserting that you're somehow impervious to corporate power is not an argument. Individuals only have the absolute power to not transact in an ideal market where there is vibrant competition for your business, and our real market is far from ideal. 1. Persistent psychological manipulation (advertising), including political manipulation, based on knowing your weaknesses better than you know yourself. 2. Punitiv…

> Punitive insurance rates based on unreasonable inferences, especially for mandatory insurances. Like say doubling your auto insurance rate for buying more than a few beers per week. Or your health insurance going up from buying a power tools. Is it just supposed to be self-evident that those inferences are unreasonable? I've always thought that this was an interesting argument. If there is some form of correlation…

> If there is some form of correlation with beer consumption and and car accidents, wouldn't it make sense to adjust your estimated risk based on that information?

Nope. Because it's flawed reasoning. If many people who get into accidents were driving drunk and everyone who drives drunk buys beer it might seem logical to increase rates for everyone who buys beer, but people who drive drunk are only a small percentage of the people who are beer buyers. That kind of reasoning seems more likely to be a weak justification to raise rates for a large number of people than a reasonable response to a trend.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#374

Post by loup-vaillant »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #369
dredmorbius wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've already given a literal life-or-death example above, which didn't involve guns. Strategems in which individuals are denied the very fundamentals of life, food, shelter, work, engagement in civic, social, commercial, or cultural practices, access to courts, institutions, and the like, without overt threats of violence, are far more effective than guns. to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excel…

I've already given a literal life-or-death example above, which didn't involve guns. But it was far too specific (and frankly too obscure) to serve as a general basis for argument. Pacemakers used to run on plutonium. Should that influence the larger debate over nuclear power versus fossil fuels? If someone has to use a pacemaker or insulin pump that runs proprietary software, that's unfortunate as far as it goes, bu…

> Specifically, what they will have to say about the idea of an open-source pacemaker is "No."

Not specific enough. What they would most likely object to is code you can modify. Code you can inspect on the other hand is a whole 'nother business. And one could easily guarante their pacemaker runs the code the manufacturer says it runs, by having reproducible builds, signing the source & binary, and have the device itself communicate (at least) a version number.

Being able to modify the source would be potentially even better, but if we could at least inspect it, then we would know of bugs & vulnerabilities (some of which have affected Karen Sandler in the past), and the manufacturer would have no choice but be shamed and correct the error.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#376

Post by vkou »

rjf72 wrote: post #361
roenxi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using that information to sell you things. The horror. The threat isn't corporations. The threat is when the government goes rogue as governments tend to do unpredictably from time to time. The threat materialises in the government using private corporation data to target arbitrary minorities (although usually the educated, wealthy, foreign and free-spirited). People seem to think that because it "could never happe…

It's ironic to see a comment like this in a thread on Snowden. It's remarkable how quick we are to forget about things such as PRISM [1]. PRISM is a government-corporate surveillance coop. Players include Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many others. Capabilities described in slides never intended for public access indicate unilateral access by the NSA to "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stor…

PRISM was an internal NSA web-form for sending what was considered (by some, but not tested in courts) to be legal data access requests to US cloud app providers.

It was a f---ing web-form for sending targeted, narrowly-scoped, legal notices. Nothing more, nothing less. It was not some magical all-seeing Eye of Sauron that gave the NSA a backdoor into every word you ever said online, your blood type, and the number of nose hairs that you plucked this morning.

The really illegal backdoor, unscoped intercepts, including the cable taps, were done without the consent of most (all?) of the companies in question, and were not done through PRISM, but rather through physical access to, say, cross-datacenter cables, straight up hacking, and similar means.[1]

[1] See: SSL added and removed here :v) https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her...

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#378

Post by quickthrower2 »

sleepychu wrote: post #3

Customers who bought this item also bought - ALFA AWUS036NEH Long Range WIRELESS 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi USBAdapter - Yubico - YubiKey 5 NFC - Two Factor Authentication USB and NFC Security Key, Fits USB-A Ports and Works with Supported NFC Mobile Devices EDIT:formatting

More interesting is what the people who will go to their local book store to buy it with cash will also buy, but we'll never know.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#379

Post by yuduhhrhr »

tomatocracy wrote: post #307
GordonS wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what country this is in? Here in the UK, nothing had changed, and any debate that wasn't centred around condemning Snowden and justifying the actions of the security services, was very short lived.

I'd disagree that nothing has changed. Consciousness of the fact that mass surveillance is happening is much more widespread, and gets brought up in passing from time to time. People have changed their behaviour somewhat - eg many now try to use encrypted communications quite consciously and even Signal has become quite popular for example. It's influence thinking over e.g. use of facial recognition cameras in public…

It's amazing how people still believe government laws will protect them from spy agencies.

The CIA spied on the Senate and nothing happened.

Naive in the extreme. So naive its hard to believe the opinion is genuine and not Astro turf.

Re: Edward Snowden: Permanent Record

#380

Post by stef25 »

INTPenis wrote: post #202
stef25 wrote: post #63

Before his story broke there was an AMA on Reddit about govt surveillance, I'm 90% this was Snowden. Does anyone else remember this? The person spoke of these things happening in ways we "couldn't imagine". People were guessing at what he meant and his responses were mostly "it's much worse". One redditor posted some highly technical speculations to which the author responded "you're getting close". Reddit's search i…

Funny enough Google has great tools for searching within that time period. Snowden broke around Q1 2013 right? So I tried searching from Q4 2012 to Q1 2014 and the first thing that came up on government surveillance was actually this[1]. Which I assume is not what you meant but it's pretty early in the timeline of Snowden's revelations. Setting the timeline to 2012-01-01 - 2013-07-03 is just before Greenwald broke Sn…

It was an anonymous AMA, author specifically stated he was "inside" so not Doctorow
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