Congress Is About to Expand Government Hacking Powers dated Nov 29, 2016 Note: Good Morning America! This takes effect today unless Congress withdrew it!!! Update from yesterday: Game over: New US computer search law takes effect Thursday -- Tom
'could have', used a lot. so, it's speculation? if i coulda had different parents i'd be 6 ft. tall instead of 5'8''. there is NO privacy on the internet. if you put anything up there, or on your PC connected to it, it's public even if you did not want it to be. so, never record anything you are doing illegally, they will find out. or someone will. never put anything on your pc or 'the cloud' you do not want the world to see. they will. i'd rather have paedophiles, fraudsters, conmen, etc. unable to get away with hiding their perversions and acts. if you can't stand the time, don't do the crime.
More: https://edgylabs.com/2016/11/30/web-anonymity-ends-thursday/ So use a VPN and become a suspect?
no, more like driving a car past a robot speed camera, you only get zapped if you were breaking the law.
@kronckew - are you not concerned with false-positives, and erosion of the rule of law? There's no accountability on this I can see, even if you say they don't need a warrant. And, given that there are legitimate, widely different viewpoints about this, should it not at least be something debated under nominally democratic elected representation? The use of VPNs does/should not make you a suspect, in fact, it's fairly mandatory for business use, and operating in wireless hot-spots.
Well now.... all that is missing are thought police. And of course: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"
The rule is now in effect. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...mass-hacking-government-take-effect/94683030/
Sure, it's all public. But what's not public is who I am. Or which who I am, at any particular time. Or something like that, depending on context
Like I say, there are people who wouldn't really mind having government cameras shoved up their ***. I personally don't care if THEY want to have THEIR privacy invaded, just don't touch mine. That "I have nothing to hide" excuse doesn't work with me, and IMO only shows how some are alienated by what the governments have been wet-dreaming since before WW1. But hey, in the world of moden slavery where everybody is busy all the time, most exchange privacy with CONVENIENCE ;-)
Life goes on. This is just the advent of the legal OK tick box to do what they have been doing for the last 20 years in secret.
The sea change is not the legal position, it's that the economics of the monitoring has changed, and the way in which the capability is being "shared" over a huge number of organisations and people. Even cross borders. Whereas in the past, people knew and accepted dirty illegal ops in a small number of operations where substantial effort was required to conduct the operation, and might even - gasp - require personal presence and risk by the operatives. These days, hundreds of thousands of people can use these tools from the comfort of their own desks, for purposes which have nothing at all to do with national security, and be - in practice - completely immune to prosecution for misuse and over-reach. Some else's problem. So I'm not sanguine about the argument that this has been going on for ages - what's happening now has never ever been done before in the history of the human race. Not even in the most tyrannical regimes in history.
deBoetie I understand your point but I think this has been going on at least "underground" since 2001. I agree there is a huge problem with accountability with the faceless men but this is where a strong bi-partisan judge comes into play. The US judges are now the main protectors of internet privacy. Hopefully they have the will to deny most outlandish requests. I don't hold out much hope though. Things have gotten more progressively conservative through out the entire world.
The technical changes since 2001 include that in recent years, a terrabyte ain't what it used to be (hence keeping-it-all becomes much easier); penetration of smartphones; and that data-mining and pervasive computing has become more prevalent. All changing the economics and technical feasibility of things which are serious errors of judgement (for example, GCHQ's Optic Nerve programme). I don't think the judges have the information or technical skills to kick back sufficiently, particularly not in the "bent" secretive courts like FISA or the IPB in the UK.
Yes sadly I agree. Data has become cheap both bandwidth and storage. And Judges probably don't have good technological backgrounds. As I said things have gotten more conservative in most of world. It's slowly getting worse and worse.
Yes, technology for surveillance and compromise has improved greatly. Plus automation, and growing AI. But even so, relying for privacy on legal protection and judicial restraint is pretty iffy, no?
Yes it's very "iffy" but what other hope do we have? We must hope Judges will protect what little privacy we have left. I admit it's a tough sell. The people who make the privacy software we use every day would number less than 1000 I think. We are asking a lot of a few select people. Either we see greater adoption of privacy tools by the general public or privacy will be dead.
Well, we have as much privacy as we create. Online, at least. As I type away in my bunker But you're right. Most people won't bother. Won't have a clue, really. And that's sad
Just make sure that your friends and family have privacy and the rest of the clueless mass will some day see the light. Hopefully. They just need to be exposed to more news of what happens when the fox (government) runs the hen house. U.K.’S MASS SURVEILLANCE DATABASES WERE UNLAWFUL FOR 17 YEARS, COURT RULES https://theintercept.com/2016/10/17/gchq-mi5-investigatory-powers-tribunal-bulk-datasets/ Quebec provincial police admits to monitoring six reporters’ phones in 2013 https://www.thestar.com/news/canada...under-surveillance-too-media-outlets-say.html
