On 6/13/2013 10:54 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 12 Jun 2013, at 21:03, meekerdb wrote:
There's still a free version of PGP available as GnuGP. But people generally don't
want the inconvenience of dealing with encryption.
On 6/12/2013 3:16 AM, Roger Clough wrote:
How to protect your computer from spying by the IRS and Eric H. Holder, Jr.
These days it seems that you need to protect yourself from more than
commercial vendors, namely spying by the IRS and Eric H. Holder, Jr.
Snowden, the man who recently exposed the NSA activities, says he can
from his desktop listen to your telephone and read your email.
But it would have been illegal for him to do so. People are always able to do illegal
things. The question is what preventive measures should be taken. Snowden was an IT
tech who was just supposed to keep the system running, so of course he had the ability
to tap data flows. But there should have been some administrative oversight to keep
him from doing that beyond what was necessary for his work (and maybe there was).
The question is should it be legal for the government to collect this data. The
Supreme Court has said it's Constitutional and polls say it's favor 62% to 34% by the
public, so...
The US government is doing the dictator trick (NDAA 12, NDAA 13).
NDAA ??
Those are not just non-constitutional they are anti-constitutional.
It's not so clear that collecting phone records is unconstitutional - although I think it
should be. The Supreme Courts reasoning was that it is "business records" which are
collected already by the phone company and you have no expectation of privacy; anybody at
the phone company could read them already.
The human rights applies to all humans, or they lost their meaning.
Human rights are a human invention. So far as I know the government watches
everybody. :-)
The private life has to be respected for all humans.
Easy to say, but what constitutes "private". I read that (don't know if it's true) the
U.K. now has one surveillance camera for every fourteen people. Appearance on the street
was always considered "public" - but it some sense more is different.
It seems clear to me that prohibition has succeeded in putting bandits into power, which
makes legal or illegal things only for special interest.
It's not especially prohibition (we repealed that); but democracy is always subject to
pressure from special interests. The founding fathers idea was that many competing
interests would "cancel out" or "average to the general interest". But they didn't worry
about the power of money and extreme inequality - they were rich white men, most of whom
owned slaves.
Health should be separated from the state, like religion.
Doesn't Belgium have universal health care, mandated by the state?
Free competition has to be allowed among all art of helping others, and nobody can
pretend for you what is good to you.
Some people do money on fears and catastrophes. The war on drug is a golden mine for
bandits and terrorists.
After the NDAA 12 I am afraid that the war on terror begins to look to me suspiciously
like the war on drug.
Absolutely! "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded
because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies;
from these proceed debts and taxes ... known instruments for bringing the many under the
domination of the few.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual
warfare."
----- James Madison, Political Observations, 1795
The notion legal/illegal must be relativized when the evidences add that the government
don't play with the rules.
It's not that they don't play by the rules: They make the rules.
Brent
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