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Forced Exposure

groklaw.net

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161–170 of 430 posts

Re: Forced Exposure

#161

Post by VLM »

einhverfr wrote: post #77
quail wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama continues to push hard to steal what little privacy rights US citizens have remaining. He is openly hostile about it, and lies about it constantly. Am I exaggerating here? The scary thing is I'm not. He's not done. It's going to get worse.

What is even more scary is that we have been in freefall in this regard mostly since at least Nixon signed the Banking Secrecy Act. This was followed by Carter signing FISA.... Regan followed, signing among other things legislation to allow the military to enforce drug laws domestically as an exemption to Posse Comitatus. This meant that the military was involved in surveillance at both Ruby Ridge and Waco, and also…

The purpose of elections is to give the populace the false idea that they have a choice. If they could actually change anything, they'd be outlawed.

Re: Forced Exposure

#162

Post by 001sky »

ihsw wrote: post #116
jgg wrote: post #35

Since we weren't allowed to say it when it was relevant, and the point was muddled and trampled on in pseudo-rational debates (“Can you find evidence that they’re abusing this new legislation?”, etc.), I'll go ahead and say it now: it's happening. There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, m…

> the best way to control a population is to analyze and manipulate the information they consume The comparison that some have made between the US Government and Stasi is more accurate than you think, with regards of Zersetzung : > By the 1970s, the Stasi had decided that methods of overt persecution which had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too crude and obvious. It was realised that…

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Re: Forced Exposure

#164

Post by rolux »

ENOTTY wrote: post #145
rolux wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect that US tech companies who are complicit in dragnet surveillance - and PRISM specifically - are already understanding this. Absolutely. Just as 2013 is the year where "ordinary people" have begun to understand that "the cloud" is a scam. (And that is doesn't make that much of a difference if they store their data with Google, Apple, or directly with the NSA. If the blueprints of PRISM can't be kept from l…

There's no evidence the blueprints of PRISM were leaked, just training slides for analysts. There's also no evidence that actual surveillance data was leaked. This particular slippery slope argument seems weaker because one would expect the government to place tighter controls on the data or the blueprints.

I was using the term "blueprints" colloquially, meaning "plans" or "details". Quite a few of the leaked slides are exactly the type of material that one would expect the government to have "tighter controls on", compared to petabytes of mostly useless data.

Re: Forced Exposure

#165

Post by auggierose »

bostik wrote: post #72
jgg wrote: post #35

Since we weren't allowed to say it when it was relevant, and the point was muddled and trampled on in pseudo-rational debates (“Can you find evidence that they’re abusing this new legislation?”, etc.), I'll go ahead and say it now: it's happening. There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, m…

> best way to control a population is to analyze and manipulate the information they consume That brought back a quote from a past: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." I had to look it up to get the exact wording right. Was only half surprised that it comes from Orwell's 1984.

That implies you have not read 1984. You should.

Re: Forced Exposure

#166

Post by mr_spothawk »

jgg wrote: post #35

Since we weren't allowed to say it when it was relevant, and the point was muddled and trampled on in pseudo-rational debates (“Can you find evidence that they’re abusing this new legislation?”, etc.), I'll go ahead and say it now: it's happening. There's still a big world outside the Internet, and yet ironically, we live in a world where some employers are so stupid that they won't hire someone without a Facebook, m…

> once you debase intelligent debate/freedom of expression and [...] you debase the minds of the people as a whole and open the door to committing worse atrocities.

see: the cultural revolution

Re: Forced Exposure

#167

Post by prawn »

Chomsky noted in a speech recently (http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/chomsky_the_u_s_behaves_noth...) that the very vast majority of us have absolutely no impact on the policy of our governments. Only the upper tiers have influence and the utter richest minority are likely to get what they want.

In both the US and where I am in Australia, the two major parties are barely different and doubly so in regards to this whole issue. A vote is not going to mean a great deal.

But a vote that can make some difference is voting with our wallets. Can very conscious purchasing decisions made by more and more people remove some of the influence held by the very richest on our planet? Is that too dreamy?

Where possible, I try to avoid purchasing from the biggest brand in any category, but there'd be a lot, lot more I could do about this. If we imagine the typical food pyramid, but fill it with brands and apply it to every product and category showing the richest and most influential at one end and the delightful smallfry at the other, could we help motivate people to make better decisions about where they spend their money? Or even where they earn it? Earn a fraction less to work for a smaller supplier perhaps.

Apps, surveys, social media, gamification - these are all things that might help people make more careful decisions. Ride a bike, grow food or buy from independent greengrocers at least, seek out furniture that's locally made, etc.

Give me a site/app that asks me about my life and rates my efforts or motivates me to make a better choice in everything I do. Help me identify brands that feel independent but are actually owned by corporate monsters.

Re: Forced Exposure

#168

Post by ak0s »

jacquesm wrote: post #37

Holy crap. Groklaw? I'd never for one second thought that the fall out from the NSA debacle would reach so far as to cause Groklaw to be shut down. PJ feels extremely genuine here, she is definitely not using this as an excuse. Wow. There is something very unhealthy in the air or in the water these days. Lots of people seem to be totally immune to the consequences of rampant surveillance and frankly bizarre powers ex…

Don't be very optimistic about Russia. Things are even worse here, but local and worldwide ignorance presenting the problem as non-existent.

As for whistleblowers — it's all about politics and “your enemy is my friend” between States and Russan rustlers.

Re: Forced Exposure

#169

Post by rainsford »

Maybe I'm just not "getting it", but this seems like an incredibly odd decision. It is not a revelation that plaintext email can technically be looked at by people beyond the sender and recipient. And it's not clear what in any reported stories would specifically relate to Groklaw's use of email.

What it seems to come down to is the general fear that the NSA COULD, from a technical perspective, be reading specific unencrypted emails. But before the recent news stories, did PJ (or anyone else) really send and receive emails thinking "there is no way the NSA, or anyone else, can see this email"?

As far as chilling effects go, the knowledge that a multi-billion dollar signals intelligence agency is technically capable of reading an unencrypted email seems pretty mild. Is free speech and free communication really so fragile that it rests on the idea that casual communication you make no special effort to protect is totally out of the reach of large police or intelligence organizations?

Re: Forced Exposure

#170

Post by cookiecaper »

FedRegister wrote: post #159
xradionut wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to use it, you can figure it out. It requires more work than most people care about.

Not in the same way that you can use email though. It is unsafe to use GnuPG on a computer you do not own or trust like a computer at a public library or an Internet cafe. It is, however, possible to register an email address on such a computer and send unencrypted email on that same computer with some precautions and still be fairly sure that the contents will not be connected to you.

It's just as safe to use GnuPG on a public terminal as it is to use any other password-protected functionality on a public terminal. You run the risk that the terminal is recording your input and that your password may be compromised. In one case, this may compromise the security of your private key, and in the other case, it may compromise the security of your email account.

One could argue that GnuPG is actually safer on a public terminal than generic online email access, because if you keep your keys on a USB stick, it's another critical piece of data that would have to get collected separately before the captured input data was of any use (this could be automated, but it'd be much harder than just running a keylogger, especially if one undertakes avoidance techniques). If one accesses an ordinary email service, the log would look like "gmail.com↲cookiecaper↲mypassword", which obviously contains all information necessary to access an account. As long as the private key is not automatically copied by the terminal, you can simply change your passphrase after each usage of a public terminal and it simply won't matter if someone stole your input or not.

The only issue is that in the real world, most terminals do not have GnuPG installed. We should be using taking this opportunity to try to change that, while public interest is on the topic.

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