8 ms·

While I understand her (1) personal reasons for shutting down Groklaw, this is an extraordinarily bad decision for privacy and democracy. In the last few weeks

by mixmax 13y ago

While I understand her (1) personal reasons for shutting down Groklaw, this is an extraordinarily bad decision for privacy and democracy. In the last few weeks quite a few providers of private communications and/or freedom (for some definition of freedom) have shut down. Lavabot, Freedom Hosting, etc. If the US could shut down The Guardian they would. This leaves fewer and fewer secure channels for private communication, and less and less information about what is actually going on. This is an incredibly dangerous road to walk down, and is akin to the Intelligentsia leaving Germany in the 20's. We all know how that ended. (1) edited his to her - thanks for pointing it out rolux

rolux 13y ago
> While I understand his personal reasons pj = Pamela Jones But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian states that they can no longer report on certain topics from London. It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols.
- willvarfar 13y ago
  > we need entirely new communication protocols Whole new enforcement of privacy laws, you mean?
  - rolux 13y ago
    No, I mean protocols. While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. (But note that "protocols" may also have non-technological components.)
    - willvarfar 13y ago
      Its a subject I keep an eye on, e.g. freenet and off-the-record messaging. I think these systems cannot work :( If you can make a system that is immune to traffic analysis - http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion-email http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion... is my own blog but I'm about to shoot it down - then you basically have an open router and the spam abuse that implies. Any reasonably anonymous system will collapse under the weight of abuse :(
      - rolux 13y ago
        Just two points: - That's why I prefer to think about protocols, as opposed to a system (i.e. global implementation of one or more generalized protocols) - You don't always have to solve the problem theoretically; solving it practically may be good enough. A system can be usable for a long time, before it collapses under abuse.
      - bigiain 13y ago
        Its not as though we don't have a spam problem already… Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion – anonymous but requiring micro-payments. Say, 500 or 1000 satoshi (around a tenth of a cent) per message delivered – not as a means of generating revenue, but as a way to destroy email's current "if I only get one sale per 100,000 emails I send, that just means I need to send 10,000,000 emails a day to get my desired 100sale/day" vulnerability - if that actually cost the spammer $10,000/day, it just wouldn't happen. ('course that required having hard currency to bitcoin exchanges easy enough for the general public to use, and scalable enough to service a significant proportion of internet-using people)
        pessimizer 13y ago
        >Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion That's not fresh. I think it may have even been entertained by Congress for a while.
        willvarfar 13y ago
        Yes there have been various attempts at proof-of-work algorithms to fight e.g. spam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system Bitcoin is itself a proof-of-work system. However, these again don't work. The abuser has ample resources to actually do the work on: a botnet.
      - nanoscopic 13y ago
        Your final statement here is not true. The way in which you keep anonymity with an onion system is as follows: 1. Use a central originating server for onion packet sourcing 2. Make it public who all users are 3. Have onion packet creation contain "token of receipt" for all messages along the chain. 4. Rate limit message origination from users 5. Ban users who refuse to forward encrypted packets at a steady rate 6. Only allow small message sizes ( 10k ) 7. Have all online users constantly originate "bogus" packets to random users 8... I am currently writing such a system. Some details up at circleofdistrust.com in about a month or so.
    - StavrosK 13y ago
      If your laws are being ignored by institutions in power, you have bigger problems, and you can't code your way out of each one fast enough.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. So you intent of fixing just a small point of the whole mess (the surveillance thing) and not the overall mess (bad governments, something that affects 100% of our life and countries)? Not to mention there is nothing to fix this way. Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time.
      - rolux 13y ago
        No, I'm just saying that working technology (like general purpose computers as affordable consumer goods) may be harder to ignore than "the voice of the people". (In Philosophy, you'd call this position "materialist", I assume.)
      - bigiain 13y ago
        "Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time." I think that genie is well out-of-the-bottle. Did you see the article recently about installing linux on the microcontroller on a hard disk controller board? There's no end of "consumer electronics" that have "general purpose computers" inside them. Hell, I'm helping out some people deploying christmas lights with a half-gigahertz ARM Linux board with wifi as a controller. (hardware details here: http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-open-source/ http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-op... if you're curious). They've shipped over a million RaspberryPi's in the last 16 months - they're mostly still going to be useable in 20 years time, and between now and then pretty much every toy,appliance,car,tv,phone,coffeemachine,whatever is going to contain something capable of running linux...
        raintrees 13y ago
        Fertile ground for David Suarez' Daemon...
    - mcv 13y ago
      You need to fix both of course. The broken political situation needs to be fixed, but communication protocols need to be improved too. And of course, as long as the current political situation in the US lasts, cloud services in the US cannot be trusted. Run your own server, or use a server abroad.
    - ordinary 13y ago
      Popular movements have accomplished incredible things over the centuries, and almost none (I'm hedging, I want to say there were none at all) of them were achieved by ticking a box on a voting form. The level of repression in the West today, while certainly not at its lowest point ever, is still lower than it's been for much of the past century. It's easy to feel helpless and isolated, to feel like you can't do anything because the government is so big and you're so small. Realise that this feeling of helplessness is not based in reality. It is fostered; not by some kind of global conspiracy between government and business, but because it serves the interests of powerful people and institutions everywhere. There is no need for them to cooperate, for them to get together in shady backrooms to decide how next to disempower you. Their interests just happen to align. But that isolation is not something you're forced into. You can break free. It's not easy, but if people suffering under military dictatorships can do it, then in our (still) relatively free society, we can do it too. Anyone who feels like this should read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I'm rereading it these days (relistening, actually), and while it's certainly not perfect, you'll get a lot out of the shift in viewpoint.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      I think we need to press hard on all the above (and below). Code, vote, protest, move money, organize people, &c.
- Torn 13y ago
  For anyone looking for the sort of topics the Guardian can no-longer report on, and the dangers all reporters now face: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-m...
- zenocon 13y ago
  > It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols How about new government - one that isn't broken and tramples on all of our civil liberties? The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex
  - Torn 13y ago
    > The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex Yeah that'll happen
  - fluidcruft 13y ago
    BRB building cover for drone attacks.
  - chii 13y ago
    in order to dismantle the MIC, you first need equivelent or better millitary power. How else do you do it?
quail 13y ago
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.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  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 directly provided military equipment and in some cases personnel to these operations (in addition to Navy SEALs raiding crack houses in some cities). Then came Clinton and things got worse again with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and some other laws. Then came GWB, no further comment required. And now we have Obama. Whoever we elect screws us. That's the truth.
  - VLM 13y ago
    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.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      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.
      - VLM 13y ago
        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.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
I made the same mistake WRT pj's gender. Read groklaw for a long time before noticing.
knowtheory 13y ago
> 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 their domain. Let's not let the hyperbole get away from us here.
- panacea 13y ago
  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.
  - knowtheory 13y ago
    Shuttering a press outlet is a different thing in kind than what is happening right now. 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/ http://ire.org/conferences/ire-2013/keynote/
    - panacea 13y ago
      Intimidation, confiscation/destruction of property without due process, invasive surveillance and retention under 'terrorist' laws for family of journalists is a difference of degree than what happens in Mexico. I hold the liberal Western governments to higher standards though, and see the difference in degree as being eroded more easily than you suggest.

by mixmax 13y ago

rolux 13y ago

> While I understand his personal reasons pj = Pamela Jones But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian states that they can no longer report on certain topics from London. It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols.

willvarfar 13y ago
> we need entirely new communication protocols Whole new enforcement of privacy laws, you mean?
- rolux 13y ago
  No, I mean protocols. While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. (But note that "protocols" may also have non-technological components.)
  - willvarfar 13y ago
    Its a subject I keep an eye on, e.g. freenet and off-the-record messaging. I think these systems cannot work :( If you can make a system that is immune to traffic analysis - http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion-email http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion... is my own blog but I'm about to shoot it down - then you basically have an open router and the spam abuse that implies. Any reasonably anonymous system will collapse under the weight of abuse :(
    - rolux 13y ago
      Just two points: - That's why I prefer to think about protocols, as opposed to a system (i.e. global implementation of one or more generalized protocols) - You don't always have to solve the problem theoretically; solving it practically may be good enough. A system can be usable for a long time, before it collapses under abuse.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      Its not as though we don't have a spam problem already… Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion – anonymous but requiring micro-payments. Say, 500 or 1000 satoshi (around a tenth of a cent) per message delivered – not as a means of generating revenue, but as a way to destroy email's current "if I only get one sale per 100,000 emails I send, that just means I need to send 10,000,000 emails a day to get my desired 100sale/day" vulnerability - if that actually cost the spammer $10,000/day, it just wouldn't happen. ('course that required having hard currency to bitcoin exchanges easy enough for the general public to use, and scalable enough to service a significant proportion of internet-using people)
      - pessimizer 13y ago
        >Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion That's not fresh. I think it may have even been entertained by Congress for a while.
      - willvarfar 13y ago
        Yes there have been various attempts at proof-of-work algorithms to fight e.g. spam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system Bitcoin is itself a proof-of-work system. However, these again don't work. The abuser has ample resources to actually do the work on: a botnet.
    - nanoscopic 13y ago
      Your final statement here is not true. The way in which you keep anonymity with an onion system is as follows: 1. Use a central originating server for onion packet sourcing 2. Make it public who all users are 3. Have onion packet creation contain "token of receipt" for all messages along the chain. 4. Rate limit message origination from users 5. Ban users who refuse to forward encrypted packets at a steady rate 6. Only allow small message sizes ( 10k ) 7. Have all online users constantly originate "bogus" packets to random users 8... I am currently writing such a system. Some details up at circleofdistrust.com in about a month or so.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    If your laws are being ignored by institutions in power, you have bigger problems, and you can't code your way out of each one fast enough.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower. So you intent of fixing just a small point of the whole mess (the surveillance thing) and not the overall mess (bad governments, something that affects 100% of our life and countries)? Not to mention there is nothing to fix this way. Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time.
    - rolux 13y ago
      No, I'm just saying that working technology (like general purpose computers as affordable consumer goods) may be harder to ignore than "the voice of the people". (In Philosophy, you'd call this position "materialist", I assume.)
    - bigiain 13y ago
      "Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time." I think that genie is well out-of-the-bottle. Did you see the article recently about installing linux on the microcontroller on a hard disk controller board? There's no end of "consumer electronics" that have "general purpose computers" inside them. Hell, I'm helping out some people deploying christmas lights with a half-gigahertz ARM Linux board with wifi as a controller. (hardware details here: http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-open-source/ http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-op... if you're curious). They've shipped over a million RaspberryPi's in the last 16 months - they're mostly still going to be useable in 20 years time, and between now and then pretty much every toy,appliance,car,tv,phone,coffeemachine,whatever is going to contain something capable of running linux...
      - raintrees 13y ago
        Fertile ground for David Suarez' Daemon...
  - mcv 13y ago
    You need to fix both of course. The broken political situation needs to be fixed, but communication protocols need to be improved too. And of course, as long as the current political situation in the US lasts, cloud services in the US cannot be trusted. Run your own server, or use a server abroad.
  - ordinary 13y ago
    Popular movements have accomplished incredible things over the centuries, and almost none (I'm hedging, I want to say there were none at all) of them were achieved by ticking a box on a voting form. The level of repression in the West today, while certainly not at its lowest point ever, is still lower than it's been for much of the past century. It's easy to feel helpless and isolated, to feel like you can't do anything because the government is so big and you're so small. Realise that this feeling of helplessness is not based in reality. It is fostered; not by some kind of global conspiracy between government and business, but because it serves the interests of powerful people and institutions everywhere. There is no need for them to cooperate, for them to get together in shady backrooms to decide how next to disempower you. Their interests just happen to align. But that isolation is not something you're forced into. You can break free. It's not easy, but if people suffering under military dictatorships can do it, then in our (still) relatively free society, we can do it too. Anyone who feels like this should read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I'm rereading it these days (relistening, actually), and while it's certainly not perfect, you'll get a lot out of the shift in viewpoint.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    I think we need to press hard on all the above (and below). Code, vote, protest, move money, organize people, &c.
Torn 13y ago
For anyone looking for the sort of topics the Guardian can no-longer report on, and the dangers all reporters now face: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-m...
zenocon 13y ago
> It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols How about new government - one that isn't broken and tramples on all of our civil liberties? The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex
- Torn 13y ago
  > The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex Yeah that'll happen
- fluidcruft 13y ago
  BRB building cover for drone attacks.
- chii 13y ago
  in order to dismantle the MIC, you first need equivelent or better millitary power. How else do you do it?

quail 13y ago

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.

einhverfr 13y ago
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 directly provided military equipment and in some cases personnel to these operations (in addition to Navy SEALs raiding crack houses in some cities). Then came Clinton and things got worse again with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and some other laws. Then came GWB, no further comment required. And now we have Obama. Whoever we elect screws us. That's the truth.
- VLM 13y ago
  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.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    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.
    - VLM 13y ago
      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.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

I made the same mistake WRT pj's gender. Read groklaw for a long time before noticing.

knowtheory 13y ago

> 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 their domain. Let's not let the hyperbole get away from us here.

panacea 13y ago
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.
- knowtheory 13y ago
  Shuttering a press outlet is a different thing in kind than what is happening right now. 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/ http://ire.org/conferences/ire-2013/keynote/
  - panacea 13y ago
    Intimidation, confiscation/destruction of property without due process, invasive surveillance and retention under 'terrorist' laws for family of journalists is a difference of degree than what happens in Mexico. I hold the liberal Western governments to higher standards though, and see the difference in degree as being eroded more easily than you suggest.