mrbluze writes:
"RT quotes the words of Julian Assange at the South by Southwest conference on Saturday.
'The ability to surveil everyone on the planet is almost there, and arguably will be there in a few years,' said Assange. 'And that's led to a huge transfer of power from the people who are surveilled upon to those who control the surveillance complex. It's an interesting postmodern version of power.'
This heralds the imminent realization of the goals of the Total Information Awareness program of the U.S. Government, officially commenced in the early 2000's but conceptualized in the 1960's. The underlying reasoning behind this program is pre-emptive policing.
Before Wikileaks exposures, 'we weren't actually living in the world, we were living in some fictitious representation of the world,' Assange noted. The surveillance of the Internet is 'the penetration of our civilian society. It means that there has been a militarization of our civilian space. A military occupation of the Internet, our civilian space, is a very serious one.'"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @09:20AM
In lieu of plasma weapons:
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday March 10 2014, @09:55AM
Just where the encryption box come?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @10:05AM
Such naive tripe! As soon as you use your soap box to say something that someone doesn't like, you get charged with terrorism, railroaded through a kangaroo court, and convicted of felony mischief. As a convicted felon, you cannot cast a ballot, you cannot serve on a jury, you cannot own ammo, and you can keep your soap box but no one will ever listen to you ever again. Welcome to the really real world, idiot.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @10:15AM
I figure unless the crime is for rigging elections or similar, convicted criminals should be allowed to vote even while in prison. If they've been rigging elections, it seems fitting to ban them from voting till they've served their time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday March 10 2014, @09:09PM
A major reason convicted felons in the US can't vote is that they're presumed to be black, and there is a 160-year-old tradition of people using a wide variety of tactics to prevent black people from voting.
In some areas of the US, there's even more unfair rules than that: The felons count as people for determining district boundaries, but can't vote, so areas with prisons in them get a disproportionately large representation.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by metamonkey on Monday March 10 2014, @04:22PM
You won't be convicted of terrorism. That's too obvious. They'll just go through your phone calls, search history, purchases, etc, to find something you're guilty of (mailing a fish without proper documentation or whatever) and arrest you for that. With as many laws as we have, you're always guilty of something, it's just a matter of picking which of your many crimes to bust you for.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @10:16AM
The gummit albinoniggers won't know what to believe if every communication is full of gay lesbians pouring hot grits down Zachary Quinto's pants! All powr to the elven unihorn! Everybody come to the feminaznicommie kegger at monkey taco battle land!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by choose another one on Monday March 10 2014, @10:23AM
On the one hand we know what the NSA had last century by watching "Enemy of the State" so they must be so much more capable now...
Meanwhile on the other hand a plane as big as a 777 can just disappear, with all comms and tracking lost, with all on board, over an area of sea less than 300mi wide, and no on has a clue where it went several days later. Moreover the great global all encompassing surveillance network doesn't even check if passports of airline passengers were actually reported stolen over a year ago.
Fiction or reality - take your pick
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rivenaleem on Monday March 10 2014, @02:23PM
This is why they tell you to turn off your phones. It's a conspiracy by the intelligence agencies, for whenever they need a plane to 'disappear'. With all the phones off, nobody can track your location and find the plane. Then it is just a simple task of using the hard-coded backdoor into the plane's guidance system to turn off communications with traffic control.
Once communications are cut off, they have a giant plane that flies up behind the target and it opens up doors at the front that allows it to completely swallow the plane and all the passengers.
Despite their best methods they'll never trick me into flying (and thus catching me) as my specialist headware tends to set off alarms when I go to the scanners, if you know what I mean (*wink* tinfoil *wink*)
Here's to never looking up!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by isaac on Monday March 10 2014, @10:39AM
Leaving aside the irony of linking to Russia Today for coverage about the perils of pervasive government surveillance and the opportunities for political repression it represents...
For most Americans, I'd posit private data brokers like Axciom and the credit reporting bureaus are more of a practical threat than pervasive state surveillance. While there are clearly recent examples of the US using its intelligence apparatus in concert with law enforcement agencies down to the local level to harass domestic political activists (the John Towery case for one,) we're talking about relatively tiny numbers of mostly unknown or unpopular people being targeted.
In the US, credit reports and consumer profiles now control to a significant degree what jobs are open to you, where and how you can afford to live, and even what you pay for goods and services. With rare exception, these decisions are made without your knowledge and you have little ability to challenge the decisions or the underlying information about them. Oh, there's the Fair Credit Reporting Act, but as a practical matter you have to invest your own time and resources to seek very limited redress (over and over again, especially if you've had your identity stolen and used fraudulently) - and of course it only applies to credit reporting agencies.
(Of course, these databases ALSO feed the state surveillance machine simply by existing.)
I am not sanguine about this situation improving, sadly, which is one of the reasons I'm happy to live now in a country with meaningful privacy protection and a functional democracy - not the US.
-Isaac
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Daniel Dvorkin on Monday March 10 2014, @04:30PM
B-b-but that's the FREE MARKET! It's efficient and entrepeneurial and marketplace democracy and not like the bloated wasteful socialist big government that takes your tax dollars at gunpoint AT ALL! Why do you hate America?
Pipedot [pipedot.org]:Soylent [soylentnews.org]::BSD:Linux
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @01:20PM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday March 10 2014, @06:30PM
Can't say I find it the least ironic, there's a wider diversity of views (and news!) and more reasoned (whether correctly or incorrectly) writing on RT than in pretty much all of the established western media combined (most of which is nothing but re-branded spam from the major "news agencies").
So which country do you live in? Switzerland? I don't live in the US or Russia but I have no illusions about Europe, Canada, China, Japan, Australia, SEA, or MENA, and I wouldn't assume too much on the positive side about Africa, Latin America, or South America either. Of course Switzerland is likely illusionary as well (or it's plainly irrelevant because as you say: companies).
[Sanguine... who made that into anything related to optimism and confidence? Americans? It's about blood and murder!]
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sqrt(-1) on Monday March 10 2014, @02:45PM
Total information awareness might be here. But it is the asymmetry of it - where, total information of the public is here, but not that of the "rulers". Coupled with the "third party clause" enabling said rulers access to the total information, including private entities, while that of the rulers (anywhere) being unavailable to everybody is a cause for concern.
The bigger this asymmetry, stronger the fascism ...