On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 11:00 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/11/2015 12:27 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 7:14 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/10/2015 12:54 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 7:19 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/10/2015 2:00 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 12:24 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/9/2015 3:11 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
wrote:
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*From:* meekerdb <[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Friday, January 9, 2015 2:45 PM
*Subject:* Re: Democracy
On 1/9/2015 1:08 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
wrote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* meekerdb <[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Friday, January 9, 2015 12:25 PM
*Subject:* Re: Democracy
On 1/9/2015 4:55 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Money becomes coercive under statism, because it becomes illegal
to use alternative currencies, operate outside of the banking
and
taxation system and so on.
>>Banks used to issue their own script and in principle anyone
could do
it. The trouble with anarcho-capitalism is that there's
nothing to
prevent a group from organizing, forming a "government",
raising an
army a conquering people around them. In fact that's exactly
the
arc of history. If you want anarchy you can go to Syria or
Somalia
right now.
What you describe is not the political philosophy of anarchy;
what
you describe is life under warlords, and the susceptibility of
anarchy to such organized groups of thugs.
Functioning anarchy would require a level of individual ethics
that
does not yet exist (or at least is not widespread). Anarchy is
vulnerable to being destroyed by thuggery and mayhem; no doubt
about that; however it should not be confused with that
heartless
outcome.
>>Every form of government will work well with perfect people.
That is side-stepping the point that some forms of social
organization require a much higher degree of civic involvement
than
others do.
Exactly, and anarchy that functions as well as constitutionally
limited democracy would require angels.
This overestimates the importance of things written in a piece of
paper
and underestimates the importance of social norms, culture and
education.
The reason why I don't go and loot my neighbours is not because a
piece
of paper says I can't, or even because I am afraid of the police.
Remove
this too things and I still wouldn't do it. I suspect everyone
participating in this discussion is the same. Why?
On the other hand, the Weimar constitution was powerless to stop the
nazis, and the American constitution appears powerless to stop the
NSA.
And I think you underestimate it. It is something any citizen can
point
to as a norm. Notice that everyone who complains about the NSA's
invasion
of privacy cites the Constitution as evidence their complaint is
justified.
That is true, but it's far from the only argument. Now my question is:
do you
figure that people think that invasion of privacy without a warrant is
wrong
think that because of what the constitution says, or do you figure
invasion of
privacy offends their sense of morality and then they look for
arguments to
justify their position and find the constitution?
That's a good question, and the answer supports my point. When you
poll people
and ask if they think it's right to wiretap people suspected of
plotting crimes
the majority say yes. So in a way the Constitution informs and bolsters
people's understanding of the importance of freedom from government
surveillance. If they were just morally offended by surveillance then
they
would be equally exercised about AT&T, Google, Time-Warner, Verizon,
and a
dozen other corporate organizations that spy on them. But because they
know
the Constitution forbids the government from doing it they are much MORE
offended when the government does it.
Without it they would have to give a long argument based the prior
abuses that the founding fathers used to to support the right to
privacy.
This would be a good argument had the Constitution actually succeeded in
preventing total surveillance from the government on its own people.
But it
didn't.
But it did. The NSA is only allowed to track who-calls-who, not what
is said.
Unfortunately, after Snowden we know better.
No, we don't. First, while I approve of Snowden I don't think he *knows*
everything
attributed to him.
I'm referring to information contained in the internal presentation that he leaked. Are
you unsure about the authenticity of these presentations?
One of the important tricks here is how they interpret the word "track". A
secret
court(!!!) decided that storing data is not tracking if no human is looking
at it.
So they can record your phone calls and the content of your internet
communications
and then, if they get a court order, they can go look at it.
And that is wrong how?
You know the cliched quote attributed to Richelieu: "Give me six lines written by the
hand of the most honest man, and I'll find something in them to hang him by."
A very important freedom we have enjoyed so far is to not have everything we say to each
other potentially scrutinised by the authorities. Specifically, this is a serious threat
to democracy, because outsider political candidates may be targeted for "inspection" for
background check reasons and always prevented access to power by the ones who hold the
trove of surveillance data.
But even without it, this leve of intrusion and the loss of the possibility of
forgetting is a dystopia. It is also quite protestant-neurotic I should say. Never relax.
But they don't really need to bother about these warrants. The neat "five
eyes"
system allows the participants to spy on behalf of each other,
circumventing these
privacy protections.
The NSA sent divers to place physical optical splitters on submarine
cables. It
stores all the data in gigantic datacenters and has algorithms comb through
it.
A slightly paranoid idea. It's much easier for them to get data other ways.
Again, this is from information written in the leaked slides.
http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/6/8/1370710424658/new-prism-slide-001.jpg
It infiltrated American companies, like Google, to install spying software
on its
servers. It also infiltrated technical committees responsible for
cryptography
standards to introduce backdoors in the implementation of cryptographic
algorithms.
These actions make us all less safe. Even open source cryptography projects
like
TrueCrypt decided to give up, because they were infiltrated by the NSA and
realised
they could do nothing against it.
What makes you think it makes us less safe.
Because the security holes introduced by the government can be exploited by
anyone.
I'd say part of the problem is it makes us more safe
Any terrorist organisation that is a real threat to our safety will not, by definition,
trust american companies with their communications. They will not discuss their plans on
gmail or carry iphones in their pockets. If they do, they are surely too naive to be a
serious threat. Before Snowden, Bin Laden already used air-gapped computers and
communicated by human messenger carrying USB pen. He didn't survive that long by being
an idiot.
NSA's wide surveillance's goal is surely not to spy on these people -- the NSA people
are no idiots either.
and people think being safe is more important than privacy - and they are
right at
least in the short run. The problem is the long run.
These are not the actions of an organisation that respects privacy.
Any intelligence agency worth it's salt is going to push to the limit of the law.
Would you expect, or want anything less?
Yes. I would want them to follow the spirit of the law to their best ability, because
the law expresses the will of the people they serve.
Would you be happy to hear, "Yeah, we could have found he was conspiring
to blow
up that building, but we thought we should respect his privacy when talking
to Al
Queda in Syria"
That would be a weird way to phrase it. I am an adult and can accept that freedom has a
cost. Sometimes this cost is that tragedies happen. Tragedies that could have been
prevented if we forfeited our freedoms. But that's no way to live.
Here's a good analysis of the technical aspects of the situation:
http://bit-player.org/2006/room-641a
This is quite outdated. There has been a lot of progress both on the hardware and
algorithms front. For example, map/reduce and big table style architectures introduced
by Google allow for the use of cheap consumer-grade computers to create datacenters of
unthinkable size.
From Snowden's slides, we learned that NSA stores 3 days of global communications and
then flags stuff to be kept for months or indefinitely. These flags are determined
algorithmically. For all intents and purposes you can assume they are keeping all of
your stuff and this is already leading to widespread self-censorship.
