More grist for this mill:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-17/apple-joins-facebook-microsoft-in-outlining-data-requests.html

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 5:48 AM, glen <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, 2013-06-13 at 17:09 -0400, [email protected] wrote:
> > However, I think many people do have impossible and unrealistic security
> > expectations, and if you ask a lot of them (including me) on 9/12/2001
> what
> > would be appropriate, systematic cloud server intercepts and data mining
> > wouldn't have even made a ripple in the water for me.  So there's a
> > alternative line of argumentation too that just isn't from today's batch
> of
> > news.
>
> And it's not _merely_ the "we live in a post-911" world rhetoric,
> either.  There's a deeper argument that we really _do_ want the NSA to
> stay ahead of the best state-funded and independent hackers all over the
> universe.  Even those of us who claim to dislike being spied upon by our
> own government tend to ooh and aah when they see hints of the fantastic
> technologies developed by agencies like the NSA.  Anyone who likes James
> Bond, Mission Impossible, GI Joe, CSI, Person of Interest, etc. should
> admit that up front.
>
> The fact that the NSA is building entire data centers devoted to
> exploring more occult network patterns is fscking fantastic.  And, to an
> extent, they'd be stupid to "show their hand" every time they came up
> with a new algorithm that worked ... and we vassals would be stupid to
> _want_ them to do so.
>
> But the real mistake is the loss of the mystique.  Secret work used to,
> and still should, carry that "I'd tell you but then I'd have to kill
> you" romanticism.  In our new age of "lie like you mean it", with no
> hint-hint nudge-nudge know-what-I-mean know-what-I-mean, we've lost the
> deep, rich, language that allows us to know they're spying on us without
> knowing all the details.
>
> I'm a big fan of open-* (open source, open data, open access, etc).  But
> there is a forcing toward banality that comes with it ... a dumbing down
> to a least common denominator.  We've become so literal, it's kinda sad.
> We can't all be the "cool kids".  Some of us have to be left out,
> bullied and victimized by them.  Some of us have to be the pretenders
> who claim to know things they don't actually know. Etc. And some of us
> have to bear the burden of being the dork trapped in the cool kid clique
> (as Snowden wants us to believe he was).  Without such a class
> hierarchy, our language becomes robotic and lifeless.
>
>
> --
> =><= glen e. p. ropella
> I have come undone
>
>
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