Interesting to see that there is no discussion (debate) on the problem of the NSA (by order of, or with approval of, the guv’mint) spying on everybody and the new hero Snowdon. But never mind, i’m not going to start that discussion, just wanted to point out that there is a way (for the time being, it will likely be shut down or coerced sooner or later, too) to reduce Google’s snooping on you:
Check the link about “anonymous browsing” for some explanatory details…
I often go to Google through “Duck”, which not only stops the snooping about my computer, its OS, anything i may have looked up before, and what i had for breakfast, it also provides me with human readable (yeah!) and copyable (yeah! yeah!) URLs to the sites i might be interested in looking at (meaning also that i don’t have to tell Google which of the sites it presented to me i actually visited).
PS: The internet could be such a nice place - instead it is taken over by companies that do no evil (as in the 1984 way of not doing evil) or provides helpful face recognition in vphotos to make sure you are not lonely…
So what?
If the NSA has nothing better to do than include me in their tabs about George Harrison, military history, pornography, booze, mary jane, suicide, Villon, Medak, the capital of Regurgistan, phonics, Tintin, Derek & Clive, Black Sabbath, Toland, dirty tricks, Lidell Hart, Zechariah, Lynott, and fucking anything else I wish to follow at this moment, then I wish to apply for a position.
Those toffee nosed fucks couldn’t keep up with those that they wish to, even if they tried.
They always underestimate their enemy ( a long standing American tradition), and as such should be disbanded.
How many more times?
Assholes!
I’m still waiting…
And I’d like to see them try.
My perimetre is without a doubt suspect, but what do they know about a killing floor?
Kill me?
What for?
Shit, you just did that?
You betta wake up and apologize!
That governments are spying on “their” citizens should be nothing unexpected - the more powerful a country is, the more paranoid it will (must) be. But while in China and Russia people have long experience with not trusting their governments, there has until now been enough of the facade of democracy and lawfulness in the US to allow many people the illusion that their country was morally superior to China and Russia - this facade, alrwady badly cracked thanks to the massive fraud perpetrated by the financial system, is now crumbling even further. This gives the Chinse government an advantage - they will from now much more assertively call the US’s bluff whenver Washington criticises them…
Just so y’all know, I tried accessing Forumosa via Tor and got blocked.
This is going to be a problem going forward on many sites. You come in through proxies, you look like a spammer to the forum software. Guilt by association.
They have the info of everyone else in the world, so you’re just another faceless IP address in the vast crowd of humanity. Its a bit like closed circuit TV cameras downtown: if you’re not doing something wrong, what’s the problem? Don’t be so paranoid that you’re worth anything to look at. Unless you use various trigger words and call/contact various flagged numbers, nobody gives a shit. There simply aren’t enough people to monitor everyone in such detail. Not since the Stazi in East Germany, and probably the Chinese and the North Koreans now. And perhaps also in Iran, where they’re thinking of excising themselves from the www all together.
Hold on there, this is a slippery slope. If you’re not doing anything wrong, why should police need a warrant to search your house – they won’t find anything incriminating. If you’re not doing anything wrong, why don’t you allow law enforcement to access your phone’s GPS and camera to see your whereabouts at all times – you won’t be doing anything questionable, anyway. If you’re not doing anything wrong, why get nervous when the police lights start flashing behind your car?
When the LAPD was going crazy over a renegade ex-cop, they shot up vehicles belonging to totally unrelated people without warning not once but twice because of utter incompetence. It’s only tangentially related to the current discussion, but the point is that even when you’re doing nothing wrong, you are still liable for being mistaken for a criminal. I say no, thank you.
I agree with this sentiment, to an extent, and under different conditions, but I think that you’d have to address two common counters:
The first is that the tides of political and legal statutes may lead people who were once not criminals to becoming criminals. If, for some reason, a moderately progressive Western European country suddenly retrogressed to some kind of Sharia law, that would cement legal grounds for a good many capital punishments that didn’t presently exist. A fear of such things happening might suggest that the presumption of privacy would offer one way to prevent radical political movements from affecting one’s person.
Consider Chinese government leaders professing Confucian beliefs in 1850, versus doing so in 1969, versus doing so today. In 1850, it would have been the norm. In 1969, it would be grounds for forced labor and “reintegration.” Today, it can win them political points.
The second is that, while some things may not be cause for legal dispute, they could have certain social consequences. Some people privately love certain adult-themed material, and politicians or workplace competitors may expose those people’s preferences in order to present themselves as more wholesome or competent people, even if it were entirely irrelevant to their job descriptions or actual performance.
I don’t think that this relates to your point. I don’t think free speech can be used as a defense for vandalism in any court case. If someone with some social agenda spray paints his message on the side of your house, that’s obviously vandalism and property invasion, which take precedence over free speech rights.
If I’d never read a history book I might believe in the “good police state” theory. Being literate in history though I know without a doubt what a sad, dangerous delusion it is because power corrupts and all police states end up serving only themselves.
I don’t think that this relates to your point. I don’t think free speech can be used as a defense for vandalism in any court case. If someone with some social agenda spray paints his message on the side of your house, that’s obviously vandalism and property invasion, which take precedence over free speech rights.[/quote]
It was washable chalk and he wasn’t writing obscenities. The point, though, is that facing a 13-year sentence is disproportionate, and being denied the right to use the first amendment sounds like a very ominous precedent.
It’s usually a common practice to deny certain arguments in a case when they’re not relevant to the charge. It would likely be shot down as irrelevant by the prosecution, so a judge may just be saving time. This is the same thing that got Kevorkian in jail when he tried to use an irrelevant witness’s testimonial to counter the charge against him, in the case when he defended himself. It may compel a jury, but juries, ideally, are supposed to be compelled to their verdicts by relevant facts, only. (They aren’t, but it’s nice to idealize it.)
Being washable would be a basis for lessening the severity of the charge, but that’s a plea for leniency, not an argument for innocence.
Those who have not yet considered the question of whether it’s OK to let the likes of Goolge collect data about our search habits might want to read this article (July 2, 2013)
(You are not losing out on getting the data that the biggest player may have collected:
they use, or let you use, Google and Bing data, as well, but anonymize the requests for them)
I haven’t talked about it much here, because I have the heterodox view about privacy rights, namely that we don’t have any, but that it shouldn’t concern us.
I’m not ashamed of what I do on the Internet, and if I’m going to be judged by my browsing habits, I know for certain that I’ll have good company. Everyone admits to viewing pornography, to downloading copyrighted media, to entertaining extremists, or to using a bogus username to troll forums. It’s commonplace Internet hijinks.
The issue here is not that the NSA collects this data, but only the NSA has access to that data. If we’re really trying to open our society in this way, then the NSA should free all of us to do this. It’s the exceptional status that government agencies give themselves, but don’t allow ordinary citizens, that irritates me more.
If anything, it should expose just how impotent governments are to curbing social trends, even some that break the law.
My habit of at times adding, within my communication, a greeting to unknown snoops goes back to the era when all we (the common people) had for international real-time communication was the national telephone service. I don’t see any reason to change that habit as long as mail is not fully encrypted and as long as among my correspondents there are people using Gmail and such.
Here is the larger version of sending greetings to unknown snoops:
As someone with experience in military radio communications and data encryption i never ever believed that something as open as the internet could offer any sense of privacy, but i still think that massive non-public data collections in the hands of zealous government agents are potentially dangerous for us, “the people”.
What we do is not what gets us into trouble but what other can do to us, if they choose to…
Yes!
As you said…
History teaches us that governments are a necessary evil and that superpowers are bad for people’s health. But every era has more thanplenty of bad governments and superpowers. Humankind has not yet found an effective way to contain the megalomaniac tendencies that are also a sign of our species…
