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ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

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Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#131
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how on earth has it come to this?? First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant. Then they came for me and there was n…

Do you realize how many people will find it offensive that you are using this quote to compare a treaty to the holocaust? There is a big difference between a treaty which may infringe on civil liberties and killing people based on their beliefs or ethnicity. It's okay to make slippery slope arguments, but let's not get into Godwin territory.

I realise this is always a sensitive area, but please consider that there are in fact laws on the books and government policies in many Western countries today that are every bit as evil as the kind of thing that was going on in Germany at that time.

We have detention without trial for extended periods, or indefinitely if you mutter the magic word "terrorism".

We have outright torture of detainees, and people dying in prisons.

If a suspect does get to trial, it might be in a secretive court where they have no opportunity to confront their accuser or see and challenge all of the evidence against them.

We have laws that allow government agents to infringe on almost every fundamental civil liberty by one kind of executive order or another, some of which are strikingly similar to the Enabling Act in their effect even if the intent was not necessarily the same.

We have routine invasion of privacy and monitoring of the general populace without any reasonable grounds for suspicion/probable cause/whatever you like to call it. There are well-documented cases of routine national surveillance being set up by police or security services without any oversight or consent from elected governments.

We have seen far too many cases of obvious abuse of peaceful protesters (or simply those caught in the wrong place at the wrong time) and in some cases we have seen courts accept a defence of the indefensible.

We have seen deaths at the hands of police actions that were later shown to be completely unjustified and an operational screw-up from start to finish, for which no-one has ever been held accountable.

The biggest difference between the situation today and the situation in Germany around the Second World War is a matter of scale, nothing more. And I think that is exactly the lesson that Pastor Niemoeller was trying to teach. While matters of intellectual property are hardly the stuff of revolutions, when you get into things like routine searches of private matters without justification, which in turn build on other obvious abuses that have been going in in the interests of "security" at transport hubs in recent years, I think you're way over the line into "why haven't we stopped this madness yet".

Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A shadow partition would be more effective at bypassing customs. For real boots, you use a copy of grub on a usb dongle. When grub is missing, you boot into a honeypot Windows XP partition that was installed only for that purpose.

No. "Only for that purpose" means that you never use it. This is trivially detected: the OS event logs will report that it hasn't been booted in 6 months, and no files have changed in that time. It's obvious that you haven't been using that system in the time you were out of the country; why did you have it with you? For this to work, you need to actually use the dummy partition for non-sensitive matters -- and be ab…

I'd feel ok telling the US borders I've got a special laptop just for them.

Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realize how many people will find it offensive that you are using this quote to compare a treaty to the holocaust? There is a big difference between a treaty which may infringe on civil liberties and killing people based on their beliefs or ethnicity. It's okay to make slippery slope arguments, but let's not get into Godwin territory.

I realise this is always a sensitive area, but please consider that there are in fact laws on the books and government policies in many Western countries today that are every bit as evil as the kind of thing that was going on in Germany at that time. We have detention without trial for extended periods, or indefinitely if you mutter the magic word "terrorism". We have outright torture of detainees, and people dying i…

All of that is terrible but it's not state sponsored genocide.

Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#134
post #13

Regardless of ACTA, I have already established a personal policy to: 1) encrypt my partitions (other than root, to make upgrades and reinstalls easier; I use LUKS) 2) copy the essential first megabytes of each LUKS partition to my server or shell account somewhere, encrypted with GPG 3) fill that space with random data 4) travel and go through customs 5) access the GPG encrypted LUKS blocks over internet, decrypt and…

When I travel I just hide Grub and make it boot Windows 7 instantly. (I very rarely use Windows so there isn't anything installed except Chrome.)

I think you'd have better luck giving them something they expect instead of sabotaging your system.

Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#135
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, what a coincidence ;) http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3496475

Haha! That is a strange coincidence indeed but not altogether surprising given the subject matter. It's possible someone read your post and submitted it. Just to clarify, raphman did post his link before it was submitted as a story should anyone be wondering once this moves out of the resolution of a day. raphman 7 hours ago [link] Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border... 144 points by llambda 5 hours ago

Probably not coincidence: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497285

Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#136
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution: Encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data. Use TrueCrypt (or similar) hidden volumes: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=hidden-volume

If they suspect there's a hidden volume, that won't help you either.

You can have an arbitrary number of hidden volumes.

Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realise this is always a sensitive area, but please consider that there are in fact laws on the books and government policies in many Western countries today that are every bit as evil as the kind of thing that was going on in Germany at that time. We have detention without trial for extended periods, or indefinitely if you mutter the magic word "terrorism". We have outright torture of detainees, and people dying i…

All of that is terrible but it's not state sponsored genocide.

But if it started, at this point, how would we stop it? That's the problem. All it takes now is the wrong person to get power.

Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realize how many people will find it offensive that you are using this quote to compare a treaty to the holocaust? There is a big difference between a treaty which may infringe on civil liberties and killing people based on their beliefs or ethnicity. It's okay to make slippery slope arguments, but let's not get into Godwin territory.

I realise this is always a sensitive area, but please consider that there are in fact laws on the books and government policies in many Western countries today that are every bit as evil as the kind of thing that was going on in Germany at that time. We have detention without trial for extended periods, or indefinitely if you mutter the magic word "terrorism". We have outright torture of detainees, and people dying i…

pwg's point is that the road to any sort of catastrophic illiberal state-sponsored action is paved slowly and incrementally. Not that we are living in mini 1930s Germany. The situations in their substance or scale are not comparable.

Saying that "government policies in many Western countries today that are every bit as evil as the kind of thing that was going on in Germany at that time" is very ignorant. Who are our Jews and Gypsies? Where is our Kristallnacht? Where is our Triumph of the Will? Where is our 'Der Ewige Jew'? Where are our massive crowds doing what is our sieg heil?

In fact a fundamental difference between America 2012 and Germany 1938 (among many) is that we have massive amounts of people vocally and publicly against the laws our politicians are pushing and the state of the country. In 1938 Germany you had the exact opposite.

Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go with the too naive. What they want is maximum power/profit. And it's not politicians --those are mostly puppets. America is/is becoming a corporate state, and corporatism was the very essence of Mussolini's fascism. The very notion of lobbyist groups is fascistic (Mussolini himself partitioned the power system in Italy to consist of various group interests in a great extend). Power and law become then an exch…

> America is/is becoming a corporate state, and corporatism was the very essence of Mussolini's fascism. Not the same thing. 'Corporatism' in the Italian Fascism sense does not mean what you think it means. It means all society is organized 'corporations' controlled by the state.

Actually, the same thing.

All society is turning to "organized corporations" controlled by the state.

That's why in my comment above, I did not only talk about corporations as such ("Microsoft", "Google", "Apple", "GE", etc), but also about lobbies in general.

All those (actual companies, and aggregate lobbying entities like the health lobby, the christian lobby, the gay lobby, the gun lobby, the press lobby) etc are the equivalent of fascism corporations.

A nice discourse of this can be found in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Unconscious-Civilization-John-Ralston-...

Re: ACTA will force border searches of laptops, smartphones for pirated content

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America is/is becoming a corporate state, and corporatism was the very essence of Mussolini's fascism. Not the same thing. 'Corporatism' in the Italian Fascism sense does not mean what you think it means. It means all society is organized 'corporations' controlled by the state.

Actually, the same thing. All society is turning to "organized corporations" controlled by the state. That's why in my comment above, I did not only talk about corporations as such ("Microsoft", "Google", "Apple", "GE", etc), but also about lobbies in general. All those (actual companies, and aggregate lobbying entities like the health lobby, the christian lobby, the gay lobby, the gun lobby, the press lobby) etc are…

> Actually, the same thing.

No. Look up the definitions.

> All society is turning to "organized corporations" controlled by the state.

Again, only in your mind. There is no evidence of this outside your head.

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