3 ms·

It's not much of a rebuttal -- the OP has facts and experience, you offer aphorisms and come close to invoking Godwin's Law.

bad_user 13y ago
What happened during WWII is a blue-print for what society should not be (like an anti-pattern). Lets not restrain ourselves from talking about it based on some stupid Internet meme, especially when talking about relevant topics, such as identification, surveillance, discrimination, privacy and all kinds of human rights that should be fundamental for everybody, alien or domestic. Personally I think @PavlovsCat raised some interesting points. I also hate arguments by authority; if anything @bazillion's experience as an NSA employee and a CIA contractor raises red flags when thinking about his agenda or bias (although kudos for his transparency on the issue - isn't transparency great btw? ;)) What really bothers me about @bazillion's opinion is the logical fallacies he conjures: 1) establishing a protocol for communication is done by meeting with your peers well in advance, which does happen; trying to make this problem harder by restricting what you can do is setting up a straw-man 2) you can still use phone lines, you just need to buy a bunch of prepaid cards, tossing them away after usage, preferably with short messages without going into specifics, accompanied by small chat on weather and baseball games - you can make it so that conversations are indistinguishable from normal conversations or from noise, without using stenography and while still bearing important information. You can also receive incoming calls this way. You buy them in bulk, you communicate the numbers to your peers and you toss them away after each incoming call, with your peers being left to try out the next number in sequence. 3) on the Internet you can use strong encryption, in combination with whatever email accounts you want, including Gmail accounts, you just can't use the web interface. Route that access through easily changeable anonymous proxies placed in countries were the U.S. doesn't have much influence and voilà - you can be immune of NSA's spying and surveillance on the Internet, as they'll have nothing - no words, no name, no IP address. They can't even prevent the message going through, as you can ask for confirmation in your encrypted message and have that confirmation delivered encrypted as well. Surveillance on the Internet only affects the uneducated, which happen to be normal people living normal lives. 4) the world is not divided between evil men that conspire and maniacs that want to watch the world burn - Snowden's intentions and motives are actually irrelevant. And what NSA apologists don't seem to get is that NSA's intentions or motives are also irrelevant. What really matters is the final result ... people are not safer due to NSA's actions, while these actions are a disaster for privacy and for human rights in general. In fact terrorism prevention only fixes a symptom of the larger problem and one has to wonder why the threat of international terrorism is much smaller in Europe.

bad_user 13y ago

What happened during WWII is a blue-print for what society should not be (like an anti-pattern). Lets not restrain ourselves from talking about it based on some stupid Internet meme, especially when talking about relevant topics, such as identification, surveillance, discrimination, privacy and all kinds of human rights that should be fundamental for everybody, alien or domestic. Personally I think @PavlovsCat raised some interesting points. I also hate arguments by authority; if anything @bazillion's experience as an NSA employee and a CIA contractor raises red flags when thinking about his agenda or bias (although kudos for his transparency on the issue - isn't transparency great btw? ;)) What really bothers me about @bazillion's opinion is the logical fallacies he conjures: 1) establishing a protocol for communication is done by meeting with your peers well in advance, which does happen; trying to make this problem harder by restricting what you can do is setting up a straw-man 2) you can still use phone lines, you just need to buy a bunch of prepaid cards, tossing them away after usage, preferably with short messages without going into specifics, accompanied by small chat on weather and baseball games - you can make it so that conversations are indistinguishable from normal conversations or from noise, without using stenography and while still bearing important information. You can also receive incoming calls this way. You buy them in bulk, you communicate the numbers to your peers and you toss them away after each incoming call, with your peers being left to try out the next number in sequence. 3) on the Internet you can use strong encryption, in combination with whatever email accounts you want, including Gmail accounts, you just can't use the web interface. Route that access through easily changeable anonymous proxies placed in countries were the U.S. doesn't have much influence and voilà - you can be immune of NSA's spying and surveillance on the Internet, as they'll have nothing - no words, no name, no IP address. They can't even prevent the message going through, as you can ask for confirmation in your encrypted message and have that confirmation delivered encrypted as well. Surveillance on the Internet only affects the uneducated, which happen to be normal people living normal lives. 4) the world is not divided between evil men that conspire and maniacs that want to watch the world burn - Snowden's intentions and motives are actually irrelevant. And what NSA apologists don't seem to get is that NSA's intentions or motives are also irrelevant. What really matters is the final result ... people are not safer due to NSA's actions, while these actions are a disaster for privacy and for human rights in general. In fact terrorism prevention only fixes a symptom of the larger problem and one has to wonder why the threat of international terrorism is much smaller in Europe.