Federal Judge Finds National Security Letters Unconstitutional, Bans Them

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/nsl-found-unconstitutional

 

Which means this order will get reversed faster than you can actually say National Security. The 9th is notoriously pro-Washington. This is what I meant in an earlier thread, you can't change privacy and security issues without changing the mindset of those in power, no matter how many VPNs and other tech you try to surround yourself in. ISPs and other companies either won't or can't fight back, and then you have companies like Google that will publicly take a stance against issues like this and turn right around and continue their own bad habits. It's a gigantic mess that, for the most part, average citizens are near powerless to do anything about.

 

I've been thinking for a while, of ways to punished the government for violating my privacy. At present, my favorite has been to start a collection of junk true-crypt volumes. With memory getting so cheap, they are going to spend a lot of time and resources searching my computer and drives, even if I tell them the honest truth that I'm innocent. So might as well make a game out of this. Am I right?

 

Do any of you recall those wacky days when we used email sigs with all the hot keywords?

That was seriously dumb, wasn't it?

 

We weren't dealing with government/corporate/citizen paranoia back then as we are now, nor was there as many privacy issues at the time. Computing security itself was much simpler.

 

There's nothing dumb about an action that states
"We don't approve of what you're doing."
IMO, this kind of response should be taken much farther, eg encrypted gibberish (or disk wipers, file encrypters, etc) in drop boxes, draft folders, encrypted containers and drives, etc, anywhere they might look. Why stop at using up their resources?

 

" those who fail to learn from History are doomed to repeat it...."



".... I have here a paper signed by Her Hit..., he guarentees peace in our time..." no need to rearm to defend the island....



We are at war guys don't ever forget that..... or will it not be real for us until something really bad happens in our own town?

It will happen again and then you will be screaming why didn't "they" do something about it to prevent it....


wake up...

 

Governments across the globe are more paranoid than ever. Say what you want about the likes of Anonymous, guys like Aaron Swartz, etc, but they are a threat to governments and corporations, and in a good way for us. (Anonymous gets a little out of hand and often ends up no worse than the people they are fighting, but that's what happens when there is no organization, splinter groups and so on.)

The problem with people like them is that, on one hand, they shed light on what goes on behind the curtain, which is good. On the other hand, they have a part in why the loss of privacy, the surveillance and the loss of freedom in general is happening at a much faster rate than in the past. They are both the solution and the problem. If Anonymous ever became a structured, like-minded organization like they intended to be in the beginning, and if Wikileaks ever went back to its roots and replaced spotlight-happy people like Assange, God help the people behind that curtain I mentioned.

 

Assumptions made here are:

1) what goes on in government (we elected them) is evil/bad because you don't know national security secrets. Governments should reveal all information to everybody.

2) what goes on in corporations (we buy their products) is evil/bad because you don't have access to their patents and other assets they have paid for. Corporations should reveal all their information to everybody.

3) Your own privacy is different of course it is yours and should not be available to everybody.

 

1. No government should reveal all their secrets or security information to everyone. There's transparency and then there's stupidity and security suicide. I, like most others concerned want the NSA, the CIA and Washington to do the jobs they are needed for, to take out threats wherever they may be, and keep information about home security and military tech that others could use against us, secret. China doesn't need to know what we're capable of, Iran doesn't either.

What I don't want, however, is that technology being turned on its own citizens without being able to ask why. Without being told "Because we say so" and shooed away. I don't want blanket surveillance on vast groups of people in the hopes of catching a few bad guys. Citizens don't have a right to know that the government is working on an extraordinary weapon out in the desert that could change warfare forever. They do however have a right to know why the NSA plugged itself into ISP networks and deserve a better response from said elected officials than "Because we said so..now here's a National Security gag order letter...we're warning you".


2. Corporations have far less say so in what they hide than the government does. Most of these are public entities with shareholders. My original statement about corporations was more about data collection and tracking than anything else. I don't really give two craps what the secret recipe of KFC chicken is or who is planning a hostile takeover of who. My comment was directed more towards the Googles and Facebooks of the world, the advertising industry and folks like that. I'm a stockholder myself, so you're damn straight I deserve some insight into what goes on in the companies I hold stock in.

3. Citizen privacy should stay stay citizen privacy. The government has every right to and should gather intel and go after "the bad guys". The issue is that the definition of "bad guy" and "threat" isn't as clear as it once was.

 

Interesting read.

 

Yes and this is a very valid and well supported assumption. I have seen countless times in history governments coverings their own asses by making incriminating evidence top secret.

 

Which is better, open-source software, or closed-source software?