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NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

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Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#121

Post by briandear »

quirkot wrote: post #57
slg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not usually in the "if you have nothing to hide..." crowd, but this isn't some kid in Minnesota who downloaded a Metallica album. This is someone who created a business enterprise to circumvent US law. This is someone who pulled in tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars from this business. For a time this business was the single biggest source of pirated content in the world. All of this was done basically…

> someone who created a business enterprise to circumvent US law Kinda like Uber? rim shot But I'm still kinda serious. Your whole comment works if you swtich "pirated content" for "unlicensed, unregistered taxi service"

Uber isn’t stealing the property of others. There isn’t a federal law that you must have a taxi medallion.

Owning a taxi medallion of declining value is a consequence of the market.

Having songs you have recorded, spent money marketing on be stolen? That causes financial harm to the artists.

Imagine spending 40 million to make a movie. Now have your work given away for free to anyone that wants it. That is theft.

An unlicensed “taxi” service isn’t harming the rights of innocent people. It isn’t stealing. Who are the actual victims of Uber (besides women employees?) Really nobody. If you own a taxi, nothing is stopping by you from driving with Uber. Uber isn’t stealing your car.

Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#122

Post by briandear »

slg wrote: post #82
geomark wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That are a vast number of laws that are designed to enrich one party at the expense of another. They are nearly always portrayed by the captured regulators as being for the safety of the citizenry when actually they are primarily for the purpose of enriching themselves and their cronies. One could argue that it is every citizen's duty to circumvent or directly violate those laws in the interest of fairness to all cit…

The ideals behind your post are great, but can we not pretend that Kim Dotcom is Rosa Parks? There is a difference between civil disobedience in which your comment advocates and profiteering from breaking those unjust laws. Airbnb and Uber certainly broke some laws that were only put in place to protect monopolies. I think that is good for society. But they also broke plenty of laws that were legitimately for public…

AirBnB and Uber didn’t make a business out of stealing other people’s property and profiting from it.

Everyone in an Uber or AirBnB transaction is a willing participant. Huge difference.

Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#123

Post by briandear »

petre wrote: post #106
wildmusings wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US intelligence apparatus exists to protect the interests of the citizens of the United States. A foreigner who violates millions of dollars of intellectual property belonging to American citizens and companies is a threat to our interests, and also of the interests of the nearly 200 nations that participate in the global copyright regime, whose copyrights he was also violating. Foreigners on foreign soil have no…

> protect the interests of the citizens of the United States Namely the RIAAA and MPAA in this particular case.

And the artists that make the content. RIAAA doesn’t actually own copyrights – artists and labels do.

Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#124

Post by b3lvedere »

moomin wrote: post #59
jonknee wrote: post #44

The only mention of NSA seems to come from Kim... His logic appears to be that as a Five Eyes member the NSA and GCSB have some shared resources and that means the NSA used those resources to spy on him. That might be true, but he has no evidence that the NSA cares one bit about him. I seriously doubt the NSA was tasked with working a non-terrorism related piracy case, but that's me. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.c…

Worth pointing out at this point that Kim is a heavily-documented liar. If he told me the sky was blue, I'd go outside to check.

Yep. He has been for years and years. http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/kimble/

Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#125

Post by tripzilch »

willstrafach wrote: post #100
arca_vorago wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in 7 years when a leaker finally leaks the documents that prove it ala Snowden, I wonder what thing we will be warning ya'll about that you will claim has "no evidence". Look, as a fairly rational conspiracy theorist, I recognize the importance of evidence, but in cases like this, it's very unlikely unless a leak happens for you to ever get it, and hence instead of looking for deductive evidence you can never rely…

What is the goal in discussing something if there is no proof? I just don't quite understand. If there was evidence of such loopholes, people could demand change from their representatives. Without proof, I guess the only thing someone can do is repeat it in any IC-related thread on HN to get some easy karma points (Seens to work well!).

Don't care about the karma, what is the goal of defending those assholes from the NSA, there is loads of things being claimed about shit happening all over the world on HN that are pretty reasonable to discuss even without hard proof, but whenever it's something totally expected the NSA is obviously doing, there's always some patriot going "ah, but there's no proof". These bastards openly deny my right to privacy because I was born in the wrong country, I'm not forgetting that, they don't deserve a benefit of the doubt, nor have they ever shown to earn it. Where is the evidence of that?

Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#126

Post by mmjaa »

b3lvedere wrote: post #124
moomin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth pointing out at this point that Kim is a heavily-documented liar. If he told me the sky was blue, I'd go outside to check.

Yep. He has been for years and years. http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/kimble/

Mega-CAAAAR!

(One of the first times I realised that the web was going to be mis-used/abused by morons...)

Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#127

Post by mmjaa »

incompatible wrote: post #115
jonknee wrote: post #44

The only mention of NSA seems to come from Kim... His logic appears to be that as a Five Eyes member the NSA and GCSB have some shared resources and that means the NSA used those resources to spy on him. That might be true, but he has no evidence that the NSA cares one bit about him. I seriously doubt the NSA was tasked with working a non-terrorism related piracy case, but that's me. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.c…

Whether or not the NSA spied on Kim in this instance, it would be interesting to know whether they have the capability of spying on NZ networks without assistance from the GCSB. It would be a classic case of shooting your own citizens in the feet: wire up your telecommunications network to allow unlimited spying on demand, then watch as foreign powers make use of it for whatever purposes of their own.

>the capability of spying on NZ networks without assistance from the GCSB

Of course they do. Read the Wikileaks! The NSA has given itself provenance over the entire planets' worth of digital content. They hack the origin.

Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#128

Post by mmjaa »

arca_vorago wrote: post #107
drunkenmonkey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's time for honest people like you to stop interacting with the plebs directly, and to start to educate them through mass-spectacle more. You're of a different breed; remember it.

What kind of mass spectacle do you have in mind?

The "spectacle of ignorance" on the part of the masses. The most horrific thing to come from all of this, is that we're all not at all interested in the knowledge that we have secret masters who have given themselves the right to inspect anything, alter anything - at all - in the digital world, and use that to maintain and continue to expand their power base.

None of that matters.

What matters is just how little any of us give a fuck.

When Snowden hit the wires, it was a digital apocalypse for a lot of people. The GCHQ "catalog of intercepts", such as it was, just hurt like hell. The details about Keyscore and the technology that out-Google's Google: horrific. I can't explain how depressing it is to know that there are hardware y-combinators out there, in the oceans, providing an elite class with advantages none of us will ever see, in their effort to project power in the new, digital, order.

It was absolutely disturbing.

What made it hard to wake up from the hangover was the realisation: 99.95% of the digital-using world just don't give a fuck, because they don't understand.

We cannot trust our computers any more. We never could, really, but now: we just can't.

How do we back out of this situation? It has to start with a local revolution: roll your own. Grow your own. And, unfortunately, that isn't happening. Technological centralism has enslaved us all - and there are only a few, elite, who can escape these bonds.

Are you one of them, "citizen"?

Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#129

Post by mmjaa »

Natsu wrote: post #105
willstrafach wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is fine to speculate, but I believe the "call" for direct evidence (versus unsubstantiated claims) makes sense given the headline stating the unsubstantiated claim as if it were a fact.

I wish more people would call out all stories on this more often. Given the Snowden revelations, this story is very believable to me, but we should never slack in requesting proof.

You (and I) have been given very clear proof that the entirety of our digital technological world has been subverted by an ultra-elite class to serve their (secret) purposes.

The call for proof on individual cases is, of course, a valid one. But to overlook the fact that we have no way to put the genie back in the box - that, in fact, there are two computer worlds - one for us, and one for the elites - is to allow ourselves to be enslaved by secrets.

The secrets that Snowden gave us all have only really further served to enslave us all. We, the people, do not care. And now that we have demonstrated that we don't have the gumption to care about our own enslavement, the deal is sealed. Nobody is fighting back, because nobody is aware, because nobody wants to know the truth: the world has gone computer, and none of us have the keys. Only our masters do.

Re: NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand

#130

Post by mmjaa »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #45
wildmusings wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US intelligence apparatus exists to protect the interests of the citizens of the United States. A foreigner who violates millions of dollars of intellectual property belonging to American citizens and companies is a threat to our interests, and also of the interests of the nearly 200 nations that participate in the global copyright regime, whose copyrights he was also violating. Foreigners on foreign soil have no…

You are right, or something resembling right, as regards Kim Dotcom in relation to the US. But there is still something troubling here for Americans, because it means that there is an existing mechanism (and/or set of social relations) in place by which American copyright interests can turn the intelligence agencies into their servants. Once such machinery exists, it is at least as dangerous to Americans as it is to…

> troubling here for Americans

Fuck Americans. There is no such thing as America any more.

The machinations of America's secret, inner cabal effect all humans. America is a host species for a true parasite, and it is this parasite that we must defeat. Not America. And, if you are American, "the others" are no longer your enemy. Your true enemy, American, is in your own midst.

The time for the American context is well and truly past.

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