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Forced Exposure

groklaw.net

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Re: Forced Exposure

#211

Post by logn »

I posted this in response to the American being groped on travel to India, got -3 karma points: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240211

Now I'm reading this story, in which pj explains her story which was exactly my point from the comment linked above. What's the deal?

Anyhow, yes, when the sum of human communication is read by the US government (and other governments and private intel corporations) then it's incredibly destructive to the human condition and society.

We're fucked. Time to start fixing this for real. Open up your IDE's and/or text editors and get to work. Make sure to open source (GPL or Affero GPL) everything. Work on decentralized P2P encrypted networking. Good projects: cjdns ... see you on the flip side. Hack the Planet!

Re: Forced Exposure

#212

Post by VLM »

einhverfr wrote: post #182
VLM wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you can use elections for is to extort policies from elected officials. The problem is that means being willing to vote for the greater evil if you don't get the things the country needs and our country is unwilling to enter into that mentality.

I think you're missing the point that the actual important policies are not up for debate and are agreed to by both sides before the two winners are picked for us to vote on. All the electorate gets to decide on is meaningless stuff. Both candidates will always want the elimination of privacy, destruction of the middle class, complete subservience to wall street, etc. The electorate gets to decide on unimportant stuff like the skin color of the winner... it doesn't really matter because either winner will implement the same policies, although perhaps with slightly different PR campaigns.

A fundamental impedance mismatch is the public wants/needs policies. However they're only allowed to vote on two hand picked two sides of the same coin "leaders", not the actual policies. The "winner" is the candidate who tells the best lies about policies, which will of course be forgotten after inauguration, and both are going to do the same thing anyway so it doesn't matter very much which wins.

Re: Forced Exposure

#213

Post by jcromartie »

cookiecaper wrote: post #151
shimonamit wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The longest key in the world won't protect you from a FISA warrent.

What. A FISA warrant doesn't magically render RSA invalid. If all your comms are encrypted, they can get whatever warrants they want, and they still won't be able to read your information unless you surrender your passphrase and key.

They can, and do, force you to divulge your key.

Re: Forced Exposure

#214

Post by espeed »

lazyjones wrote: post #16
gokhan wrote: post #6

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.

Corporate boycotts. Massive, Internet-wide corporate boycotts. Corporate lobbyists influence/fund politicians so influence the funders.

See "Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim" (http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...)

What would the effects be from a flash boycott if X-million people suddenly stopped buying from a corporation? Someone could devise a model to calculate the effects and find potential candidates.

The SOPA blackout showed what's possible when the Internet organizes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA). Turn it into an Internet meme that empowers the people, and keep it going until the echo grows too loud to be ignored.

It would probably require the cooperation of a team of computer scientists, finance geeks, and social-marketing gurus to organize the campaign. Or maybe one clever hacker could pull it off.

See "Derek Sivers: How to start a movement" (http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movemen...)

Rootstrikers: http://www.rootstrikers.org/ted_promo

Re: Forced Exposure

#215

Post by jebblue »

rainsford wrote: post #169

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 un…

My thoughts too, to me, ordinary email is like a conversation in the park. People can listen to that if they want, it's the public. Ordinary email goes over the public Internet. It seems to me to be a bit of elegant arm waving. To me the restrictions on encryption are of more concern. It's like saying we can't have a private conversation except within the bounds of what the government says is OK.

Re: Forced Exposure

#216

Post by wyck »

The solution at least for the time being is not going to be over the pipes, it will have to be real world.

A 1 GB USB costs approximately 4$ , you can encrypt the information and use the regular mail with no return address. To avoid cameras in the post office you can use a 3rd party or a real world dropbox.

This sounds so sci-fi dystopian it's hard to believe it actually a plausible solution.

ps. Don't forget to use gloves, make sure "they" can't track your purchase, and also check if the drive is clean as a whistle.

Re: Forced Exposure

#217

Post by VLM »

mcv wrote: post #97
demallien wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that it's useful to be talking about Obama specifically. Before Obama there was Bush Jr, who was the sitting president when most of these programs were put in place. It should be clear now that it's not one specific President, or one specific party, but the whole political class that has been corrupted. Thinking things will get better at the next election will absolutely not help things, unless the issu…

I lot of people were hoping Obama was the start of a new direction. I'm now hoping he'll be the last of the old direction. The big problem to solve is: how do you elect someone different? As long as the two parties get to decide who American can elect, democracy is a hollow gesture. And the media are all in the pocket of the main parties. Honestly, it seems like only Al-Jazeera US might be the only independent news s…

"As long as the two parties get to decide who American can elect,"

No, its one set of political campaign donors, not two parties.

One set of donors, hires two competing PR firms masquerading as political parties, to implement two different messages aiming at the identical goal.

Its relatively effective and stable as a technology for social control. Its also effective at benefiting the people who are running it, which is obviously not the general public or humanity overall or the environment or pretty much anyone but a couple 1%ers.

Re: Forced Exposure

#218

Post by corin_ »

lignuist wrote: post #180
jacquesm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ... If you don't know use a gender neutral word ... "it"?

"They".

Re: Forced Exposure

#220

Post by lazyjones »

cookiecaper wrote: post #171
lazyjones wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Teach people about client-side encryption.

As an IT professional I cannot honestly do this without going much further (like teaching them about using an Open Source OS instead of Windows, the dangers of modern hardware components like PCI NICs, BIOSes that may be remotely infected by malware/modified, keyloggers, TEMPEST, defeating Truecrypt, PGP, Bitlocker with memory dumps etc.), way out of scope for a normal person.

I don't think it's feasible for most IT-savvy people to access the Internet using commodity hardware (regardless of software) without exposing themselves to mass-surveillance or at least inherent weaknesses that may be exploited for that purpose at some point when secure client-side encryption becomes more widespread so that just snooping traffic at major backbones is no longer sufficient.

As a result, it would feel wrong to give people a false sense of security by teaching them about client-side encryption only.

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