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Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

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Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#141

Post by ams6110 »

gnaritas wrote: post #136
dhimes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a rant, just an observation: Republicans aren't conservative. They are military-industrial socialists. That's why things like Fox get annoying: they go around pointing fingers at the others, yet push out their own stimulus packages (via military spending increases) and their own flavor of socialism. A lot of "true" conservatives have left the party. FTR, I don't classify myself as either liberal or conservative;…

These true conservatives might have left the party, but they're still voting for the party because I don't see any big shift in representatives yet that mirrors this big exodus you speak of. I know many such ex-republicans, they all still voted Romney and republican despite their vocal protests of the party.

Given that Romney got a lower turnout than McCain, it certainly seems that some number of people have left the party, or are at least witholding support for the time being.

Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#142

Post by ams6110 »

jacquesm wrote: post #39
gnaritas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I disagree entirely, but looking at deaths prevented isn't really relevant. Terrorism isn't about death, it's about terror, putting people in a state of fear. The war on terror isn't about preventing death, it's about preventing fear. People aren't afraid of choking on peanut butter or car accidents because they feel they have some control over those situations. Terrorism creates fear by removing that sense…

The war on terror positively thrives on fear. Terrified people make stupid mistakes, sign away their rights with reckless abandon in the hope that it will allay their fears. No electorate is so easy to manipulate as one that is afraid.

Almost all politics thrives on fear. Witness the left constantly trying to tell seniors that Republicans want to take away their social security and medicare.

Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#143

Post by ams6110 »

chacham15 wrote: post #80
ghayes wrote: post #2

I wish we would treat cyberspace analogues of established property with the same respect given to the original. For example, your e-mail inbox is the online equivalent of your mailbox. Yet, one being "on your lawn" and the other "at Google's data-center," all bets are off. While I believe the Supreme Court should do better job at explicitly addressing this (for instance, "responsible expectation of privacy" establish…

The common analogy given from law academics is that email is more akin to the telegram than postal mail. With postal mail, no one along the entire path actually opens the envelope to see what is inside. This is in contrast to the telegram where the intermediary is exposed to the contents directly. This difference is what leads to the difference in expectation of privacy. In this analogy email is actually more like a…

And then, using GPG or S/MIME would restore email to the status of a postal letter, with the message contained in an envelope of privacy. So if I GPG my email, that should confer a higher expectation of privacy than "normal" email would.

Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#144

Post by gnaritas »

ams6110 wrote: post #141
gnaritas wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These true conservatives might have left the party, but they're still voting for the party because I don't see any big shift in representatives yet that mirrors this big exodus you speak of. I know many such ex-republicans, they all still voted Romney and republican despite their vocal protests of the party.

Given that Romney got a lower turnout than McCain, it certainly seems that some number of people have left the party, or are at least witholding support for the time being.

I'll grant you that; but abstaining doesn't help much. They should be splitting the party and separating the real conservatives from the religious right.

Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#145

Post by neumann_alfred »

jre wrote: post #121
neumann_alfred wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more links (or phrases to search for) you could provide for this, the more grateful I'd be.

Regarding the HSBC settlement : http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageo... (Follow the links for a bunch of other relevant articles)

thanks!

Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#146

Post by cobrausn »

gnaritas wrote: post #136
dhimes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a rant, just an observation: Republicans aren't conservative. They are military-industrial socialists. That's why things like Fox get annoying: they go around pointing fingers at the others, yet push out their own stimulus packages (via military spending increases) and their own flavor of socialism. A lot of "true" conservatives have left the party. FTR, I don't classify myself as either liberal or conservative;…

These true conservatives might have left the party, but they're still voting for the party because I don't see any big shift in representatives yet that mirrors this big exodus you speak of. I know many such ex-republicans, they all still voted Romney and republican despite their vocal protests of the party.

That's not all too different from Democrats who criticize Obama w.r.t. drone warfare, whistle blower prosecution, etc, but vote for him anyhow.

Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#147

Post by ams6110 »

alan_cx wrote: post #137
neumann_alfred wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God forbid you travel out of the US and see some of the world, you might be "taken". Ironically, I feel the same way about the US since 9/11: I'd rather freely run my yap about (politics of) the country on the internet and not ever set foot there, than visit it and risk my freedom. Which makes me sad, because I know it has many great people in it... but a lot of things would have to change rather drastically for me t…

Yeah, I feel broadly the same way. In so many ways the US is a fantastic country, but the government and its politics are insane, and frankly scary from the outside. I thought things would vastly improve under Obama, but from what I can see, he's little more than a "Bush Lite". Pity, IMHO. Worth separating the people from their government, although I would argue that in a democracy the government is the voter's fault…

Too many generations of poorly-educated and/or dependent voters are making your wish something that is less and less likely to be realized.

Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#148

Post by rsync »

Xylakant wrote: post #109
rsync wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running your own mailserver is so basic of a technical skill that it is neither esoteric, nor is it something to be egotistical about. The name of the site is "hacker news" for Gods sake. Second, there's nothing I'm asking you to "listen to". My point was that a lot of the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth has no legitimacy without having taken the simplest, most elementary, first order step towards fixing this…

I know how to run my own mail server - I have set up a couple. L still don't because my setups tend to be inferior security and feature wise to those of people that do nothing but run mailservers every day of the week. I could argue that building mailservers is such a basic skill that everybody should be capable of doing it. Or building a house. Or growing your own food. Neither you nor I do that even though growing…

Well, again, my point was not that you're a clown for not growing your own food, my point was that you're a clown for regularly attending (and participating in) the farmers forum, having a shed full of farming implements, etc., and then complaining about the bad cucumbers at the store.

As I said, Joe 6 pack has an excuse (just like Joe Startup has an excuse not to be cultivating his own heirloom seeds).

And yes, I'm aware that email as a whole is just a mess, and that running my own mail server does nothing to combat a global observer that can just intercept all traffic anyway... but the big, big win is that my entire existing email history cannot be extracted by any LEA in the country (and possibly foreign) without my even knowing about it. The local sheriff cannot subpoena my entire email history. They have to come to me.

Another huge win is that you can communicate with others that share your mailserver without the email leaving the system - which thwarts even a global observer. It may interest you to know that no piece of rsync.net intra-company email has ever traversed any network.

Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#149

Post by napoleond »

peterhost wrote: post #129
napoleond wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company is working on this: http://parley.co EDIT: As mentioned a few times elsewhere on this thread, the biggest barrier to encrypted email adoption is the network effect, ie. both ends need to be using it. That is the core problem we're trying to solve--making an email system that would be better than the rest even if it weren't encrypted, but that's the icing on the cake.

Very interesting project. Since I watched the "what happened to the cryptodream" video, I have finally begun to understand that we need more tools like yours or say Wickr (closest to secure IM on ios...), tools which my mother who know shit about aes but know her history and what an enigma machine was, can use. The fact that your code will (?) be opensourced, is a big +1 The fact that it's secure by design is a big +…

Our code will absolutely be open source, and relies on established open source crypto libraries for the actual crypto. Thanks so much for the encouragement peterhost, and please tell your friends about Parley!

Re: Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

#150

Post by [deleted] »

mayneack wrote: post #113
nikcub wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fox News launched in '96 and became the #1 cable news channel in 2000.

It also wasn't what it is today. The current fox news functions because of fear. Remember, in the last decade, MSNBC went from trying to beat fox by supporting Iraq more than them to what they are now, I wouldn't make a whole lot of conclusions of MSNBC programming today based on them circa 2000

[deleted]
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