171–180 of 430 posts
Want to keep your rights and freedom? It's time to act, now. History is full of great things going all the way down. Don't wait for the Superman.
> It's time to act, now Suggested courses of action? Tried and didn't work: * voting * not voting * protesting online / offline * writing about these issues, raising awareness What options do we have left? Violence? Hopefully there's more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the US could shut down The Guardian they would. That's stupid. Of course they wouldn't. They would require them to stop reporting on the security state. But that is vastly different from shuttering them all together. The Guardian certainly performs a public service in a variety of other domains (from which the government can and does benefit). The security state just doesn't want the press banging around in thei…
Even better, would be to have them report favourably or obtusely instead of shutting them down. I fail to see the hyperbole here... just a difference of method.
The US is not Zimbabwe or Burma or Jordan. It has its serious flaws and issues that need to be addressed, but we shouldn't mistake the kind of creature that we are dealing with. Making that mistake will lead one to seriously misunderstand what the interests and possible courses of action that western governments will pursue.
Also, if one wanted to be really crabby about it, it's kind of disrespectful to all of the journalists who paid with their lives to contribute to the civic sphere to equate pervasive surveillance (as serious and insidious as it is) with the pervasive fear of physical harm and death that some journalists face.
Marcela Turati did a terrifyingly good job of conveying the price that Mexican journalists pay at the Investigative Reporters & Editors conference this year. If you really want to get a sense of that, you can watch the video here: http://ire.org/conferences/ire-2013/keynote/
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.
We -- all citizens of Western countries -- should seriously stop voting altogether. And I mean full stop. When the next election comes, nobody votes. That'll destabilize things right quick.
I have said this on HN several times, and I will say this again. Dragnet surveillance of private digital correspondence by the US and other governments is wrong, and a gross, unjustified, overreaction to the real threat of terrorism. And yet, when taken as part of the whole picture that is the internet, government surveillance is little more than a drop in the ocean. While governments may collect a possibly significa…
Corporations can't put me in jail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Groklaw started with some serious in-depth background knowledge of the whole SCO - Linux stuff (there's too much to describe it as anything else). That sort of information comes from having serious inside, in-depth background information. You know, the sort of stuff serious investigative journalists /used/ to do. Like the Washington Post in 1972 when they reported on illegal activity by the President ( http://en.wiki…
I may have missed it, but I don't recall any back channel information from Deep Throat type sources there. What I recall was a lot of documents readily available to lawyers but somewhat a pain in the ass for average people to track down and get copies of, especially for free. Note that I am not saying there were none...just that I never noticed them. Anyone have an example or two?
States explicitly "Groklaw relied in some cases on email tips from readers and other anonymous sources".
Following the early days of the SCO reporting it was obvious there was unreleased information being shared. There was even lots of discussion about whether Groklaw was some secret group of IBM agents and stuff like that due to the knowledge and insight being displayed at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, making the abuse and surveillance of Internet more relevant than it needs to be. You know what's my thought towards such employers? A big fat FUCK YOU! Those are companies, where I rather collect unemployment benefits than ever working one day for s…
Right, right, but for everyone that isn't a lean rockstar Node ninja programmer agile kanban expert--e.g., most of the population of the United States--it is far, far too easy to weigh going hungry against getting a "harmless" Facebook profile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That 'something unhealthy' is called privilege, and most people assume that it will protect them from government atrocities. Little do they know that privilege is given at the behest of the oppressor, and can be revoked instantaneously. I suspect that US tech companies who are complicit in dragnet surveillance - and PRISM specifically - are already understanding this.
> 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…
And the year when we understand that we are all lemmings. I remember the 90s when people were afraid of putting their credit cards on ecommerce sites, and now they put their whole lifes and assets online.
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.
We -- all citizens of Western countries -- should seriously stop voting altogether. And I mean full stop. When the next election comes, nobody votes. That'll destabilize things right quick.
Would be more realistic to elect a third party, meaning someone who is not part of the corrupt R/D duopoly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
she
True, but is it a good impulse? http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but is it a good impulse? http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
In this case, yes. PJ being a woman is very well known and it irks me when people automatically assume that anybody that runs a thing as successful as groklaw has to be a guy without checking. If you don't know use a gender neutral word or check, it's simple. It's not purity in language, it is paying basic respect to a person who is named several times in full in this thread.
"it"?