General News Verizon Providing All Call Records to U.S; Data Being Mined From Internet

Not that I like to lean any-which-way politically, but in the words of Paul Ryan:
"Welcome to Washington."

 

This is a huge problem. I recommend we start encrypting communications for this reason. I use encryption for any communication that I take seriously (which is to say, anything I think would be embarrassing to me if made public, anything financial in nature, or anything related to planning social justice actions).

This is going to be used by law enforcement eventually for ethically unsound reasons against political opponents. Regardless of whether it's democrats or republicans in office.

Please educate yourself on encryption, especially PGP, and try to think about your online behavior. If you're putting something up on a secure place, like DropBox, remember that the NSA can get to it with a national security letter, and you have no recourse. A subpoena can also get them to release your data. But if you encrypt your stuff, nobody can get to it.

I also recommend encrypted mobile phone communication...

 

Amen and noted for future reference, respectively.



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Ah, never too early to start the speculation! (Begrudgingly interested in politics despite my nihilistic views toward it). I agree that it hurts Democrats in general, but it'll help tremendously that Hillary left before all this crap sprouted up.

Have kept and will have an eye on Christie for 2016...I know your typical liberal will disagree, but a great balance of steadfast personality combined with a perceived moderation there (amongst the less partisan crowd that wins you presidential elections, anyways).

Of course, that all assumes that the Republicans can get things in order so that you don't have a puppet like Romeny (or in the next election Christie) having to go waaaaay too right on social issues in the primaries. It'll be a couple of decades if they can't get that figured out.

 

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We've had this conversation before, but I really don't think Romney would have been any better. I have no regrets participating in his rejection. I readily admit the Democrats are generally bad on civil liberties. But in my opinion, Democrats are bad on civil liberties precisely because they are pretending (badly) to be conservatives. This is all under the guise of "tough on terrorism" so that the Democrats can say they are doing something on it...

I'm convinced the Republicans would have eventually done something like this.

Fortunately, integer factorization and the discrete logarithm problem are problems that can't be solved in polynomial time.

The federal government can kiss my fucking ass.
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Pretty sure this is nothing new and was certainly not originally started under the Obama administration... At least it is warranted now.

 

Sdfndsklvndslkvsdjvpdsigjsdfisorgjsdv.

Dsfjdsofjsdoifdsjfiodsvnsoimsdtsrtsgs.

Estsrnkgesngojsdnvifsobsoigsodigjsriogmsriovsmrgmstoirjtokretj.

That's what I saw the minute you mentioned "please educate yourself on encryption." I recently started using Dropbox. What am I supposed to do? I know what encryption is, I just have no clue what to do about it or how to go about it. Maybe if we all learned, it wouldn't be so bad.

As an Obama supporter, I'd usually come to his defense. With this...I'm not sure. I think it's wrong of his administration, yet again...there's probably a lot worse from a lot of people. With the Internet, we can't be silly anymore and think people aren't going to snoop. It would be like living in a glass house and complaining your neighbors saw you having sex.

Two big issues we face are that we are dealing with backlash, either way. What if the government found out someone was calling, say, a number linked to a known terrorist...the government then when and got that person, and found out they were building a massive bomb. We'd all be saying "GOOD FOR THE GOVERNMENT!" However, if we didn't do this, people would say "LAZY ASS HOLES!" (That was a dramatic description, and probably only towards people that don't use their brains.....)

In terms of 2016, it will definitely hurt a democrat, yet it will have nothing to do with policy. It's just that people see that X is going badly, so they change to Y. My little town has had about 3 recent mayors that have pretty much fucked this town over, yet no one really cares to look at why it isn't going well.

I think there's a lot more at play here....we just have to figure it out.

 

Is encryption really going to do anything? I doubt it.

I just don't want this to get out of hand. First it's this and then what's next? Mass genocide? What if the government decided to kill all of the homosexuals?

 

If you're a windows user, which I assume you are, you can use TrueCrypt, which is an open source project. You can use it to create a file which you can use as if it were another drive on your computer. You just put in a password, and then you can use it without having to even think about it.

TrueCrypt works on GNU/Linux too, but my solution for encryption is different.

People have a right to keep secrets. My job involves tax information, which must be kept secret by statute. We also want our online purchases to be secure so people don't get our credit card information and steal money from us.

Many of us watch porn. Maybe we save it to our computers. We probably don't want to save it to our computers in the clear.

Encryption does a lot, thank you very much. At the very least, it forces the police to actually serve you a subpoena if they want something.

 

Equally sickening that Republicans are only pretending to be for civil liberties now so they have an excuse to bash Obama again, while for eight years under George W. Bush they did everything they could to destroy our civil liberties with the PATRIOT Act, FISA Immunity, Military Commissions Act, etc.

And just plain silly to pretend that electing a Republican in 2016 will mean the restoration of civil liberties. Democrats have a bad record on civil liberties and privacy issues; Republicans have a worse one.

And that's why I continue to have zero regrets about voting Green Party for Jill Stein in this last election.

 

Lindsay Graham is the closest thing to a fascist in the U.S. Senate today. Along with his dream husband John McCain.

Has there ever been a documented case of either of them either
A) Opposing a war?
B) Supporting civil liberties?

A far cry from a Republican Party that used to campaign promising freedom from "big government" and an end to "Democrat wars".

The only way I can see what Obama is doing as being worse than Bush is the fact that Obama campaigned in 2008 on a pledge to roll back Bush's policies on civil liberties, not continue and expand them. So he lied.

But then again, Bush in 2000 ran for office promising "small government" and a "humble foreign policy" and instead he gave us the War on Terror police state at home and wars of aggression abroad.

So Democrats and Republicans both have an established record of lying their way into office.

 

I'm honestly not seeing how this is a big deal. We're on the internet in a day and age where everything we say can be seen by the entire world. Also, the government can't do anything about you saying anything because that would violate the 1st amendment. So if I said "Hey let's go to a beach party with a shit ton of wine and sex" the government can't do anything but go "Well, that was an interesting conversation I just read"... Almost makes me want to say weird shit on my phone just to have a legislator or someone in office read my text and make a funny face at it.

The people you should be worried about are the people who are paid to stalk you on the internet, see what you post and report it back to their boss. Yes, there are businesses that have those people as part of the interview/hiring process.

So really, it's not like you didn't need to worry about what you posted in the first place.

 

I don't live in America, but here a proposal to monitor web use was struck down. Its the kind of thing I would have that much of a problem. Would you rather MI5 were able to catch potential terrorists before they strike and be able to see what you do on the internet, or would you rather be dead?

 

The world is doomed.