The one good thing I see is that cross-party-lines anger by some politicians is actually happening. The party leaderships are fighting it but for once they might be powerless to stop it.
'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
51–60 of 158 posts
Re: 'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
#52There are people who've been planning these things all along, just to give you a hint:
“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society.
Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values.
Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen.
These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
Author: Zbigniew Brzezinski, United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.
You can find this at: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162691-the-technotronic-era-...
Re: 'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
#53If you think there is nothing that can be done you should take a look at Gene Sharp's theory of nonviolent resistance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp
Gene Sharp is excellent, I am reading From Dictatorship to Democracy.
On the subject, I think the biggest problem is how to make people understand how serious this is, make them see that the similarities between what is happening and totalitarianism and even fascism is to disturbing.
Today I was speaking with a friend about faceCrap and he just doesn't care about it, he doesn't even try to get properly informed and said that no one would do anything against him because the information he shares is not relevant. I tried to explain the problems with the greed ones controlling the information (hence truth) of the planet, the political and economical advantages it brings to people that doesn't care about society and how his data could say a lot about him but at the end he told me I am paranoid :).
So the political problem we are facing, in my opinion, is a consequence of lack of interest and even selfishness.
Re: 'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
#54Of course, remember that the Guardian was perfectly fine with the government harassing journalists as long as it was not them: http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/20/despite-its-battle-with-th...
Another way to look at it was The Guardian was perfectly fine with consequences being meted out when people were illegally invading the privacy of others.
Re: 'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
In regards to your first paragraph, its a question I keep wondering. What was different about these leaks then all the previous? Why NOW are people caring?
It's too soon to tell whether this time will be different -- that depends on whether Congress or the executive branch actually changes something in the end. So far it isn't different. From the perspective of the U.S. and U.K., the Chinese and Israelies and French are undoubtedly doing their best to spy on as much of the Internet as they possibly can, and they're probably pretty successful at it, so why would we unila…
> From the perspective of the U.S. and U.K., the Chinese and Israelies and French are undoubtedly doing their best to spy on as much of the Internet as they possibly can, and they're probably pretty successful at it, so why would we unilaterally disarm?
From the perspective of the US: It doesn’t really help to assure your so-called ‘allies’ that they are indeed your ‘allies’ and not your vassals if you spy on them to such an extreme. Since you furthermore still rely on said nations for logistical reasons (and being friends with them likely couldn’t hurt anyhow), you might want to scale down your spying to accommodate the public perception. In addition, you’re hurting your own industry, especially service providers such as Google, Microsoft & Facebook, by giving the impression that it is unsafe to provide them with data.
From the perspective of the UK: I never quite got what you want to do, but you can’t expect to be even part of a free trade zone if you spy on the other member states of this free trade zone. This holds in particular if it is revealed that said spying is not necessarily restricted to catching terrorists, but also might get your domestic companies some trade secrets, which really doesn’t bode well in other member states that pride themselves on their innovation. Of course if you want to provoke being kicked out of that FTZ and join the union of your over-seas friends, that might actually make sense. Just don’t expect candy from the rest of us, then.
Re: 'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
In regards to your first paragraph, its a question I keep wondering. What was different about these leaks then all the previous? Why NOW are people caring?
Seriously - my take is that it is on PowerPoint . I mean just having "Super secret spy details" on Powerpoint means its not being handled by "our top people". George Smiley is not carefully placing a glass board under his cipher paper before taking a micro-copy. This is spying on everyone, passed around like candy at the middle-managers meeting Its the sheer mundane, ordinariness that has driven it home for me - they…
> just having "Super secret spy details" on Powerpoint means its not being handled by "our top people"
So if it was being handled by the top people, they would have outsourced the documentation to a graphic design company, to generate a super-professional looking PDF?
(Seriously, how do you expect the high level management to communicate with each other?)
Re: 'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
#57When articles like this are submitted to HN, can we have a discussion on what us as individuals can actually do (if anything)? I'd rather drop 100 comments on general FEELING towards the news, for 1 or 2 comments suggesting 'Let's create a campaign site' or 'There is nothing we can do, lets just sit here in silence' Edit: For what it's worth my ONLY suggestion is that a campaign site similar to that for SOPA, etc. is…
As a peaceful protest / 4th Amendment exercise, please consider attaching an encrypted file with EVERY email you send from now on. It's easy enough to do using TrueCrypt. It needn't be a file the recipient needs to decrypt, or keep. You needn't even remember the password. If everyone did this every time they send an email to anyone, it would flood the Internet with literally millions, then billions, of encrypted files, thereby demonstrating our resolve to maintain some level of privacy, and protecting most if not all of us "fish" in the "school" from the "sharks" who prefer to eat us one at a time (a la Edward Snowden and Ladar Levison). When fish in a massive school move together in coordinated ways, it frustrates predators. If this idea seems worthwhile PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
This accomplishes three things. 1) It makes you familiar with encryption for when you actually need it. 2) It increases the cost of surveillance and 3) It gives you an opening to discuss the topic with non-tech friends when they ask about your gibberish attachment.
Re: 'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
#58The British government looks like a farcical bully in this. A playground bruiser that intimidates his way down the hall before promptly slipping over.
Destroying the hard drives was an exercise in dominance, 'do as we say or face the consequences' which had no impact (aside from inconvenience and the cost of a couple of Macbook Pros) to The Guardian but has made the UK .gov look foolish.
Pulling Miranda, abusing the terrorism laws, sending a message is another dominance play but it's back fired awfully. Brazil is annoyed, GG is annoyed, America has calmly washed it's hands and said "leave us out of it". In terms of strategic decisions it can't be described as an excellent one. What's the UK .gov gotten out of it? Some encrypted data and social network passwords, it's not a win.
If you're in the UK and you think this is unacceptable for our government to be trying to intimidate the journalists who're revealing the uncomfortable level of surveillance we now live under, and what the security apparatus has become, then write to your MP. That's what they're there for. We can't just hope that it'll surge through the halls of Parliament, we need to be heard that we think it's not acceptable and not representative of what we want Britain to be.
Re: 'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
#59Folks, take a step back and take a look what is going on here. When you were a child, would any of you have believed that one day in the early 21st century, you would wake up in a world where your own government spies on each and every single citizen, plus whoever is connected to them in another country, where they send agents to newspapers to oppress the freedom of the press? I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like…
Spying on people is terrorism and should stop ASAP.
Re: 'Sending a message': what the US and UK are attempting to do
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> would any of you have believed Yes, honestly. For more than 20 years, the basic message of the cipherpunks and related communities has been that the NSA spends tens of billions of dollars to spy on everything "foreign" that it can possibly get its hands on, and its foreign adversaries are doing the same, so you'd better use PGP (or more) if you want any chance of keeping your communications secret from the governme…
In regards to your first paragraph, its a question I keep wondering. What was different about these leaks then all the previous? Why NOW are people caring?
I would argue that, in general, people aren't caring.
We are caring; the small band of software and technology enthusiasts who develop software and online businesses. We care. But in the grand scheme of things, people don't care so much about this. In the grand scheme of things we are a special interest group, like Anti-Fracking protesters or Animal Rights activists.
Until I hear my mother or my girlfriend or my old university pal - none of whom work in computing - talking about this issue I really don't expect things to change. The difference between now and then is that we have forums like this where everyone can instantly express their outrage, but I think all that builds is a small self-fueling bubble of outrage that nobody else who lives outside the bubble knows or cares about.