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Take a look at your technology with an engineer's eye. If it can be done, they probably will. If it can be done easily they probably already are. You may as wel
by noonespecial 13y ago
Take a look at your technology with an engineer's eye. If it can be done, they probably will. If it can be done easily they probably already are. You may as well just assume this is always the case.
In the current political climate, why in the world wouldn't they?
- mtgx 13y agoOf course. You should also be fighting it with every fiber in your body. Generations behind you gave their lives for rights like these, and the current generation seems to be giving them away because they are too busy chatting with friends on Facebook to care about it. And if you don't fight it now peacefully, you'll be fighting it in the streets in a bloody revolution, in a decade or two.
- javert 13y agoI don't see any way to fight it now. What are your suggestions? If we were to have a revolution here, even in a decade or two, we'd probably end up with something much worse than what we have now.
- dsrguru 13y agoThe only realistic way to fight untargeted spying is to protect yourself from being made a target.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoDevelop new technologies that make this kind of thing impossible.
- adventured 13y agoIf they can't control said technologies, and put backdoors in them, then they'll make them illegal. That's a non-starter. A solution can only ultimately occur in D.C.
- gfodor 13y agoAnd if they make them illegal, they'll have their day in court. I'd tend to agree the right place to start is building a technological solution to the problem. One that people actually will want to use.
- rooshdi 13y agoWhy not both? As we know, D.C. isn't always reliable.
- vidarh 13y agoThen you make new versions of said technologies that are harder to track/identify.
- briancaw2 13y agoHave Congress pass laws to make such surveillance illegal. Stop using Verizon or any other carrier that complies (economic protest). Only use technologies that don't permit such spying. Pass state legislation that is counter to the federal mandate and create an uproar that way. The list goes on. We're stil a democracy and when it comes down to it we're still a democracy that gives a lot of power to any one senator. If you have one dog in the fight - if the people in even one state can get their act together enough to elect someone on your side - there are things you can do to have your voice heard. You really shouldn't feel so unempowered - despite the 1% rhetoric, it's still pretty much the best time in the history of the world for the little guy.
- gigl 13y agoThe law already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_... We just need the laws to be followed.
- CamperBob2 13y agoHave Congress pass laws to make such surveillance illegal. Arguably it already is. Nobody cares.
- creade 13y agoAaron Swartz designed Victory Kit ( https://github.com/victorykit/victorykit https://github.com/victorykit/victorykit ) with the beginnings of this exact use case in mind. What would you do if you passionately cared about an issue but lacked the massive funds required to mount a lobbying campaign? Start building grass roots social pressure by A/B testing your entire movement start to finish.
- anigbrowl 13y agoI don't see any way to fight it now. What are your suggestions? If you're a Verizon customer, you have standing to sue the government in a class action and challenge the constitutionality of its actions.
- wybo 13y agoAnd if you lost faith in Congress, like 94% of Americans. You might also join a realistic effort to reform it: http://www.rootstrikers.org http://www.rootstrikers.org (ran by Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law prof who also founded the Creative Commons movement)
- dantheman 13y agoRoot Strikers is fundamentally misguided, they attack the symptoms instead of the cause. The root of all this corruption is how large the federal government is, any organization with that much power and money will be co-opted.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dantheman 13y agoWell, specific solutions would to be close various federal agencies, e.g. the department of education. Push law making wherever feasible to the state level or lower. Simplify the tax code - i.e. end tax breaks, reduce the overall tax rate so that the government spends less money. The key thing is to not attack our freedom to associate and speak, which is what rootstrikers are advocating. Many of the policie they advocate will be used to silence anonymous speech/activities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootstrikers#Positions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootstrikers#Positions At the end of the day, their cure won't fix anything, but it will hurt a lot.
- betterunix 13y ago"I don't see any way to fight it now. What are your suggestions?" Develop and deploy good cryptosystems, and encourage people to use them. My mother uses OTR to chat with me; she does not fully understand why it matters (or even that it is being used), yet our conversations are safe from prying eyes. Sure, it is just a small step, but it is better than nothing. A lot of small steps would quickly make the NSA's program prohibitively expensive (even for the NSA).
- e3pi 13y ago"The cypherpunks credo is 'privacy through technology, not legislation.' The law of the land can be changed by the next administration. The Laws of mathematics are more rigid."
- chenster 13y agoCan you still buy a pre-paid phone and remain anonymous on the phone bill in the states? Or they require ID now when purchasing such device?
- runjake 13y agoYou can do this anonymously, but it may take you a few tries. I've had the best luck with 3rd party T-Mobile dealers. Just give a name and decline showing an ID. Buy refills with cash at Walmart or wherever.
- adventured 13y agoVoice printing all but eliminates the idea of anonymity for tracfones. All they'd need is one conversation, and they can look for you from there on using your voice. They can back trace who you are by who you talk to and so on; relatively trivial to figure out who you are from there, particularly assuming you make a few calls and or reveal any details.
- andreyf 13y agoI'm skeptical how accurate voiceprinting can be after all the distortion/compression of a cell signal. If you have a device you use to have contacts you want to keep secret from the NSA, you probably shouldn't call your friends on it.
- acjohnson55 13y agoHaving done some work with watermarking, I would assume it's extremely accurate. There is so much information that makes it through the transmission process: your speech cadence, inflection, pronunciations, word choice, interjections, background noise, etc. The only way I'd feel reasonably comfortable defeating something like voice printing is using a text-to-speech engine.
- 4ad 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Death_and_legacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Death_and_lega...
- LatvjuAvs 13y agoYou have technical capabilities to monitor keywords, then profile people, build maps and responses from data easy. I would be shocked if that is not employed already.