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I just want to say "fuck everything", hold up my hands and walk away.
- par 13y agoyou and me both buddy.
- gopher1 13y agoBrilliant. With an Office Space reference thrown in for good measure!
- FD3SA 13y agoIt is heartening to read that a small percentage of the technical community is now willing to admit that the majority of the developed world's problems are political. Specifically, the metastasising bureaucracy which is emboldened with each successful power grab is becoming increasingly difficult to dislodge since they've built up so much momentum. This is an excellent start, but a mere tip of the iceberg. The political malady is more malignant than most imagine [1]. 1. http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/chomsky_the_u_s_behaves_nothing_like_a_democracy/ http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/chomsky_the_u_s_behaves_noth...
- marcuspovey 13y agoAbsolutely, the problems are political. But there's a technological component as well. A combined approach will, I think, have the best chance of success. We fight like hell to fix the political problem, while at the same time making sure that people have, and know how to use, the technological tools that can protect them. It is naive to assume that just one aspect will do the job.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoAdmittedly, sometimes the two kinds of problem combine into just-plain-silliness. For instance, I got my first paycheck from my internship yesterday. As in, I got a physical check, because in the middle of Silicon Valley, a high-tech start-up's third-party payroll contractor is so damn backwards that they simply can't issue a direct deposit for at least one pay period if not more. Problem being, my bank accounts are on the American East Coast and in Haifa, Israel respectively. I now have a nice, healthy paycheck and have to call the other side of the country to figure out how to deposit it, because the damn payroll system is too backwards and stupid to do an electronic transfer like the entire rest of the developed world. And no, my bank doesn't have a mobile app that lets me deposit checks through my phone. I checked. /just-plain-silliness /MURRICA
- mdakin 13y agoAgreed. I also believe there is a sociological component. A situation such as we have is only possible when a critical mass of engineers/scientists/creatives/technicians consciously choose to work on anti-human technology. The political assholes could not develop this anti-human technology on their own.
- baddox 13y agoThe sad thing is that even among the people willing to admit that the majority of the developed world's problems are political, most of them are under the delusion that more/better/different politics is the solution.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoSo you're an anarchist? Because if you're going to pretend that anarchy or proprietarianism is somehow not politics, then I've got some news for you.
- pessimizer 13y agoOr a libertarian, pretending that a police state enforcing a total ordering of property and any contract that can be conceived of isn't politics.
- baddox 13y agoNot all libertarians advocate anything resembling a "police state enforcing a total ordering of property and any contract that can be conceived of."
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoI already said "proprietarian". Please use the proper terminology rather than Applause Light words like "libertarian", which imply that "liberty" and "This Specific Ideology" are equivalent.
- pessimizer 13y agoI don't know what proprietarian means, and I tend to call people what they want to be called.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoI wouldn't call any person who advocates an oppressive police state a libertarian.
- saym 13y agoI remember Penn Jillette describing government as a ratcheting mechanism: a situation where once a bolt is tightened, the tool only recoils to tighten it further.
- jgg 13y agoYou literally reposted one article that was posted here days ago and used that as a citation to make a sweeping generalization about the "technical community" at large. Alright, that's cool... I would guess that most who pay attention realize that the problems of the world are political on the surface. Like always, most people flock elsewhere because they feel powerless to change a political issue with direct political action. Plus, questioning authority is scary. However, it all ends up being more sociological than political. The ideal behind the US involved the citizenry being able and willing to regulate the government, by whatever means, when the time came. This was done with the knowledge that power can corrupt and turn people into abusers, coming from people who were living under an abusive power. This hasn't been realized on a large scale in any recent event. Now we're staring down 10 years of really, really bad ideas that have stripped us of even more rights and have destroyed many literal and implicit ideals of the Constitution, and only now does a sizable portion of the population look back and say, "Well, shit!" If you fixed the government with the snap of your fingers, the problems would reinvent themselves given enough time. Since the state is by definition the body which has a monopoly on "force", if you got rid of the government, you will never convince me in a million years that another one wouldn't rise up in its place. I believe whole-heartedly that the state is inevitable. Thus, the majority of the developed world's problems are humans. We've had the same problems with a revolution bringing enlightened ideals that are slowly corrupted and taken away by a bloated, crumbling empire many times over. History is one giant, depressing cycle. I think the most realistic hope is to keep finding ways to build a state that insure as much independence and individuality as possible, while protecting given rights from the wills of those in power or those others in the said state. An enlightened society of individualists able to get along from day to day using only voluntary interactions, who don't care about stepping on others for power (and don't have any sanctioned way to do so) is a nice ideal, but one I don't see coming true without some drastic level of human evolution.
- tootie 13y agoThis isn't an issue of expansive bureaucracy. In fact, it's the opposite. The lack of controls on the executive, and the national security apparatus in particular. There's nothing about this case that goes beyond 1 or 2 agencies that have existed for decades and do a lot of legitimately useful things. They just need to stop issuing blanket warrants. That's it.
- jlgreco 13y agoRemember "trust, but verify"? Well, I don't trust these agencies. Worse, I have no way to verify that they are doing what they claim and that they are not doing things that they aren't claiming. We need to fix a lot more than just "issuing blanket warrants". We need to fix other things before we can even attempt to fix that.
- ctdonath 13y agoWe need to fix a lot more than just "issuing blanket warrants". Thing is, "issuing blanket warrants" is flatly illegal. In particular, "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." A warrant to the effect of "drift-net fishing expedition" is not acceptable.
- jlgreco 13y agoOf course it is flatly illegal. The problem is that we are not in a position to verify a fix. We would have to take their word that the problem has been fixed, but obviously they cannot be trusted.
- robotmay 13y agoI've been feeling very similarly recently. Most people here in the UK don't understand or care about the privacy issues being revealed. I'm just one very small fish in a big ocean of ignorance. And frankly; I'd like to be ignorant too. Maybe I should chuck it all in, buy a canal boat, and carve wooden spoons for a living.
- samstave 13y agoHow many BTC will a spoon cost me ;-)
- robotmay 13y agoHehe, about 0.21 BTC at current prices (£15). I need to get around to making a little online shop at some point; I'm currently trying to increase my speed to make that price at least slightly profitable. I make them a lot in my spare time so it'd be nice to be able to have a little side business out of them :D Examples and links to other people who are much better than me (if you fancy learning to make them yourself!) are on my newish hobby blog: http://good.afternoonrobot.co.uk http://good.afternoonrobot.co.uk
- nwh 13y agoI was not expecting the spoon comment to be genuine. Very nice.
- robotmay 13y agoIt's a great break from programming. You get to destroy something (which is stress relieving after dealing with client work ;) ) and create something (which is satisfying) at the same time. Plus a spoon is a practical object, and it certainly saves you money when sorting out birthday presents. I suspect there is a maximum amount of spoons a person needs, however. Then maybe I'll branch out (hurr) into bowls!
- keithpeter 13y agoThere is, in Birmingham UK, a chap who regularly ties up to the mooring on the Selly Oak canal, near the Vale University residence, who makes and sells wooden owl sculptures and stools for your garden. He has an iPhone, and I think I saw him on facebook last time I walked past. Perhaps what we are seeing is the 'normalisation' of the Internet/Web? It is no longer 'special' or a 'new world' but just a part of everyday. That means the balance of privacy/disclosure will have to be negotiated again. In the street, I can be stopped by a police constable and asked my name, date of birth and address. My bag can be searched, and I can be asked to turn out my pockets. The police would need a search warrant signed by a magistrate to enter my house. Magistrates are trained, they will only sign warrants under certain circumstances. Is Facebook the street or your house? I'm still thinking all this through... but yes, I think you will see a shift away from splurging everything over the Web. Of course, the people GCHQ are supposed to be trying to catch will already have adopted other communications methods...
- bhauer 13y ago> Hey, everyone! I live in California, my email is hosted by Google, I keep documents on Dropbox, and my server is hosted in Dallas, Texas. I like it. I'd add the last sentence below: I live in California, my e-mail is hosted by my server located at a data center in Los Angeles, I keep documents on my personal servers, and those servers are hosted in my data center and at my home. I use GPG, and my key is...
- reirob 13y agoI loved the comment: "Friends don't let friends use cleartext," my friend Marcus Povey writes. I'd argue that friends don't let friends put their trust in algorithms that can be backdoored, socially engineered and compromised without our knowledge. Somehow I feel too that technology cannot be anymore the only answer to the problem of global surveillance. I think there is a growing need for change of our social consciousness about the values that we want to survive.
- LoganCale 13y agoAbsolutely it's not the only answer. But it's still and always will be a critical component. It's illegal to trespass, but we still use fences and gates and locks to keep unwanted people out of our property.
- unclebucknasty 13y agoThe difference is that we don't erect fences to keep the government out of our yards, because the government is supposed to be us and the government is not supposed to be trespassing. This, as opposed to bad guys who break the law. In other words, the government is supposed to enforce the law when someone hops your fence. But where do you go for justice when the government is the one hopping your fence? This is not being pedantic. I believe it is the wrong posture to advocate for a technology-based response. We should not be building fences against our government. It implies that a continuing adversarial relationship between the people and our government is on some level acceptable. And, it sends the message that whatever the government can access is fair game. Instead, we should demand that the government be brought back into the will of the people and Constitutional principles by law. And it should be backed by not only true whistleblower protection, but obligation for fear of conviction by complicity.
- quantumpotato_ 13y agoWell put. Is it possible to fight against the police state without putting technological fences around it?
- drivebyacct2 13y agoThese are still pretty amusing. They remind me of my cousin last night posting graphics depicting outrage that they don't string up Obama for this. When I replied that most of these programs started under Bush, or likely long before that, I was told that it was "over 5 years ago". Yup. Just like gay boy scouts and Chik-Fil-A, wiretapping has been known about for half a dozen years now and is only now getting the attention that some of us have been complaining about since it began coming to light.
- ghc 13y agoWhen I was young I always daydreamed about being a programmer/hacker in a dystopian cyberpunk future. I don't know whether or not I should be alarmed that my daydreams and reality are converging.
- anonymous 13y agoIt's not true cyberpunk future until we have Rebel-brand leather pants.
- alan_cx 13y agoProblem is, you have to sell the idea of accepting a perceived risk. We have to ask the public if it is OK that every now and again really bad stuff may happen, and NOT to blame the politicians for it. Because, in the end, that is why politicians want to do everything in their power to remove risk. Why? Because we demand it. Something goes wrong, we blame them. We find any way possible to blame them, and demand to know why they didn't stop it. Now, I am happy and always have been happy to trade freedom for risk. Question is, is any one else?
- cortesoft 13y agoDo you mean you are willing to trade risk for freedom? As in accept some risk for more freedom?
- angersock 13y agoHere's the really insidious thing about the whole situation, and something that I don't think has gotten enough airtime: We are all at the mercy of the people in our social graphs who don't keep things secret. I might stay off of Facebook, encrypt all my email, and avoid using smart phones, but anybody I'm in contact with who doesn't is being continually mined. Shadow profiles of me are showing up on services I'd never use willingly because my friend shared their address book with Facebook. We really only have three groups to hold responsible: ourselves (for developing these technologies), our government (for using these technologies to oppress us), and every other citizen (for voting the government into power and playing along when we ask to mine their data). The core issue we're seeing is that it is no longer really possible to ignore the fact that most consumers are liabilities to our privacy, and that they'll gladly sell out their fellow man for the dullest of shiny trinkets. Honestly, the most insidious part of all this isn't our loss of privacy or our trust in some beneficial Big Brother: it's the distressing fact that we can't trust anyone else anymore, and that we've shown that democracy is impossible with such an unworthy populace. Make no mistake--that's the real tragedy here.
- themodelplumber 13y ago> Shadow profiles of me are showing up on services I'd never use willingly because my friend shared their address book with Facebook. Is that really so bad? The worst I've seen is "this is a picture of John" which is not an abuse that's limited to social networks. And if this happens really often, you can complain to your friend about it. And if you can't complain to your friend, you can complain to abuse. And if abuse doesn't do anything (not likely) you can send a legal notice. To jump from "a friend can mention me, talk about me, etc." to "there is no privacy anymore" is...well, I just can't get there, sorry. Do we have privacy problems? Yes. Are these examples really selling that? No. I can't remember any case in which a friend sold me out for a trinket; if you do have a common example, cite it. That would really help us all here.
- jasonkolb 13y agoHow about "I was having an argument with my friend John who is all paranoid about the government spying on him. Maybe he's a closet terrorist." Maybe your friends are more intelligent than average, but I wouldn't lump most of humanity in that category.
- maerF0x0 13y agoA little chris hedges , Cornel west and Noam chomsky is in order.
- pdenya 13y agoI like the idea of stating your communication preferences but it seems strange to put that right in your bio like he's done at http://werd.io http://werd.io as if where you keep your documents says a lot about you as a person. Unrelated, this was difficult to read with that blog styling. "font-size: .9em" for body text seems like a bad idea. Raising the font-size and line-height makes this whole site look much cleaner.
- EGreg 13y agoI think most of the outrage is about two things, which are missed by people who point out the problem is political and that snooping is technically "legal": 1) The disconnect between policymakers / lawmakers and the general population, that built up over time. While in some areas people are content to look away, or don't care that much about, in the area of civil rights and privacy apparently enough people care to keep raising a stink about this. It's not that something is technically illegal. It's a question of how did we get to the point where it's not. Where you don't need a warrant to read anyone's email, or demand any US company hand over pretty much any info on anyone. Where are the 3-branch checks and balances for things like National Security Letters, for example? http://i.imgur.com/GPyb5uC.jpg http://i.imgur.com/GPyb5uC.jpg 2) The natural people's reaction to advancing technology. Since recording everything everywhere is now becoming possible, we should get used to it. We are unlikely to successfully outlaw this anymore than we can successfully police pirating of songs. If governments aren't going to record you, corporations will. Facebook keeps a "shadow profile" on everyone including people who didn't sign up. They use this data for various corporate purposes. All we can do is perhaps regulate what purposes they cannot use the data for, but it's extremely hard to prevent them from collecting it. So organizations will collect data, because it's in their interest -- stores, for example, will soon track your shopping habits as you move around the store, and optimize their sales for this. They might do facial recognition or some other biometric thing. #2 is the more interesting issue and I think it falls into the bigger issue of people coping with advances in technology. Google glasses on everyone's head? Cameras everywhere giving you a ticket as soon as you speed over the limit for 10 seconds? (Don't laugh, we already have many tollbooths implementing speeding tickets by simply timing how long it took you to get from one to the next.) Cameras in every parking lot signaling the tow truck as soon as you leave? 3d printing guns from models? Anyone able to release a virus on a subway? Etc etc. I've always said that terrorism is a problem of technology. 1000 years ago it was literally impossible for 5 people to kill 1000, but nowadays our society will begin more and more to watch everyone. As it becomes easier, surveillance (and, what's more unnerving, automatic curation and analysis by computers!!) will become an accepted part of life. Remember how you felt when you thought you could upload copyrighted stuff to YouTube and get away with it? Before: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/10/youtube-the-big-copyright-lie.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/10/youtube-the-big-cop... After: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/youtube-vs-fair-use.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/youtube-vs-fair-use... Here we have a case of "big brother" copyright enforcement being made possible through cross referencing the fingerprint of EVERYTHING uploaded into YouTube. We learned to live with it, and few people complain. But this is just the beginning :( 10 years from now, your children may get taken away by the state because you have been caught surfing the wrong sites or saying stuff to siri (uploaded to Apple servers) that has been proven to correlate highly to child molestation or neglect. It won't happen right away, but instead an indexed archive of your activities will be retrieved and analyzed and a case built. And if a government doesn't do it, then an insurance company might do it to raise your rates, etc. If you park your car in a parking lot and do not enter the diner within 5 mins, as determined by the computer, you'll get an automatic ticket. And so forth. Thankfully many of these problems will be eliminated before they even become issues. You won't have to park your car because self-driving cars will make owning a car a luxury. You won't need to worry about your kids' college future because education will be delivered via the internet to every home. Etc.
- personlurking 13y agoThe problem with all of this "make the gov't own up and stop the spying" thing is you can't prove what is hidden. The NSA could make a statement tomorrow saying "ok, you win, we'll stop" without really stopping. They could even give an actual compelling argument about stopping, without really doing it. There's no way to prove they aren't doing it (though I suppose that ties into the fact that the big tech companies are also allowing them to do it).
- jlgreco 13y agoYup. Even in the best case scenario (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Recovery_of_the_Stasi_files http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi#Recovery_of_the_Stasi_fil...), encrypted electronic files are easier to shred than paper.
- snom380 13y agoIf we also established laws requiring service providers to encrypt private data and did away with the gag orders (made them unconstitutional), then we would at least know when they were spying.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- decasteve 13y agoI'd like to hear what others are doing. This events of the past few days have prompted me to a few measures. What is everyone else doing (or have done)? Since the NSA story broke up until today I have done (or in the process of doing): Pidgin XMPP + OTR. Switched to DuckDuckGo + StartPage for searches. Email hosted on my own server. File backup off the cloud and on to a SSH/SFTP server in house. Thunderbird + Enigmail (PGP): sending emails out signed only at the moment and explaining why. Firefox + many privacy add-ons. No private communications over social media networks.
- Zoomla 13y agoShould we all automatically forward all our incoming email to Obama
- brewdad 13y agoTHAT would be great. Some poor intern gets flooded with email until the entire WH server infrastructure melts. Of course, you'd definitely be packed off to Gitmo for your act of terrorism.
- snitko 13y ago>We have to learn how to play politics. There will be voices who call for revolution, or who publicly declare that playing this game is tantamount to aligning ourselves with government. I don't believe that these are productive discussions. It's not aligning yourself with government, it's begging your masters to throw you a bone. What kind of incentive do you think a protest creates? Would politicians suddenly shut down all surveillance programs simply because people on the streets are protesting? If you were a politician, would you? Not likely. You're already elected, you're paid and you have private interests at your back who DO pay you money that directly depend on your ability to pass laws in favor of those interests. The best a protest can do is to incentivize government to create an appearance of change. Look at history. Protest rarely solved anything. They either transformed into bloody revolutions (which didn't do any good either) or were largely ignored. No, you don't need to protest. You need to ignore the government as much as you can and tell others to. Use Bitcoin instead of govt currency and don't pay them a cut in the form of taxes, use Bitmessage instead of email, use VPN and TOR, don't send your children to school where they are indoctrinated. And never ever vote. Voting is begging your masters. Have some pride.
- ph0rque 13y agodon't pay them a cut in the form of taxes Illegal. You will be jailed for a very long time. Not something the I, or the average Joe Schmoe, will be willing to risk.
- snitko 13y agoI certainly wouldn't advocate tax evasion, it would be immoral to ask people to risk the leftovers of their freedom and confront IRS. What I meant was, don't give them a cut unless your transactins can be effectively tracked. When you tip someone in cash, most likely they're not paying any taxes from that. And there's currently no law requiring you to pay taxes in Bitcoin unless you previously converted it to fiat. Also keeping your savings in gold, silver or Bitcoin saves them from another tax - inflation.
- rsofaer 13y ago
- Zigurd 13y agoIn addition to the other problems mass surveillance has done, it has done something akin to spreading toxic waste in a playground. Who would want to play in that? A big part of technology is playful. A big part of playfulness is pushing boundaries: What if everyone had everyone's genome? What if we injected computers into our bodies? In a surveillance state that is as appetizing as bathing in industrial effluent. The technology industry is poisoned, and the only enthusiasts left are enthusiastic authoritarian snoops, and those people are disgusting sickos. It's like waking up and finding you work for the TSA and fondle balls for a living. Ick.
- prteja11 13y agoThese incidents seem like coming straight out of "Atlas Shrugged". different circumstances, similar outcome and government is the reason for the events.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoThere are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
- joonix 13y agoThere is actually a huge vacuum right now and it's in the "country" space. There is an opening in the market for a well-run nation-state that offers (1) independence, particularly from US influence, (2) pro-entrepreneurship, pro-technology, pro-science, extremely nimble governance, (3) accessibility to all of the world's educated people (hand-selected individuals chosen based on their skills), (4) safety, (5) low, efficient taxation, (6) communication privacy (7) banking and transaction privacy, (8) high quality education. Basically, just as global banking has its Switzerland, its Hong Kong, its Singapore, global internet/cloud and the tech community needs its own haven. Not only that, this country could also fill in the banking privacy niche as well. Read up on FATCA and how it's violating the privacy of millions of Americans living overseas. I wish this country could be a New Zealand or Australia but unfortunately they are completely beholden to US interests and would never be able to be independent. I really believe there is huge demand for an "elite" city-state that fills the needs I've described above but there's absolutely a market failure. This new country would likely not be democratic but run by a powerful technocrat, probably a Jobs or Musk type, perhaps with a Board of Directors. The corporate model seems to work.
- rdl 13y agoIt would be interesting to start applying filters on email based on recipient MX. i.e. if I see your MX is @yahoo.com, I don't send the mail (or send a mail suggesting you move to a better mail provider). Depending on who I am, I may or may not send mail to gmail. If I see it's a self-hosted well configured MX, I probably will send mail and trust in starttls. (You can't just rely on domain extensions due to things like Google Apps for your Domain which lets you customize the domain.)