NOT THE BEES
I just linked my boost directly to the EU parliament pdf.
edited 8th Mar '14 8:51:38 PM by Pykrete
V
Sir Tim Berners-Lee: World wide web needs bill of rights
He has been an outspoken critic of government surveillance following a series of leaks from ex-US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. Sir Tim called on people to take action and protest against surveillance.
He told BBC Breakfast the online community has now reached a crossroads.
"It's time for us to make a big communal decision," he said. "In front of us are two roads - which way are we going to go? Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control - more and more surveillance? Or are we going to set up a bunch of values? Are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the world wide web and say, actually, now it's so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?"
Sir Tim said the internet should be a "neutral" medium that can be used without feeling "somebody's looking over our shoulder". He called for vigilance against surveillance by its users, adding: "The people of the world have to be constantly aware, constantly looking out for it - constantly making sure through action, protest, that it doesn't happen."
Sir Tim has previously warned that surveillance could threaten the democratic nature of the web.
Lost in Space
Who's going to enforce it? It's just a meaningless statement without some authority backing it.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Instead of a Magna Carta, why not do something like this?
Queen of Good Things, Honest
The same people who will secure bitcoin against fraud, theft, inflation, and other financial risks without any rules or regulation needing to be placed on it, and the same people who will ensure that the people of an anarchist society will always act with each other's best interests at heart and never succumb to the temptation to f*ck everyone else over for personal gain, without the need of any kind of laws or threat of force.
If you ever figure out who that's supposed to be, let me know.
edited 12th Mar '14 8:08:57 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.
V
@ Fighteer: I'm sure Sir Tim Berners-Lee means the users of the internet, people like you and me. I wouldn't be surprised if he's very much against a single source of internet "authority".
Keep Rolling On
Lost in Space
@Greenmantle: But then you have Tobias' problem — the Internet is pretty much an anarchy. You really expect hundreds of millions or billions of people all to agree on a declaration of privacy rights and somehow enforce them?
What, exactly, would be the punishment for a transgressor? Being blogged at?
edited 12th Mar '14 8:29:11 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Queen of Good Things, Honest
Without the backing of an actual government force, any form of punishment for violating the fake internet laws would either have to exist solely in online form, rendering it meaningless - as Fighteer suggested, being blogged at - or have to follow you into the real world, which would be very much a crime.
If you hack someone's personal accounts and drain all their money and steal their personal information and then go to their house and start breaking windows, YOU go to jail. It doesn't matter what he did in the pretend world of internet. You, sir, are the criminal. The internet does not have the capacity to enforce laws. The most it can do is report violations of actual laws to actual authorities.
edited 12th Mar '14 9:25:59 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.
Lost in Space
You could have boycotts and such, but that only works (for certain values of 'works') on businesses, not governments.
Besides, if you really got that many people to all agree on some kind of universal code for the Internet, they'd have more than enough combined political weight to get their respective governments to enact appropriate legislation. Remember, governments are made up of and empowered by people in the first place.
The reason we don't have stronger privacy laws is because not enough people care to make it an electoral issue, pure and simple.
edited 12th Mar '14 9:27:55 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
A procrastination in of itself
You could see a mass of internet communities coming together to enforce such a thing. For example, I do online wargame campaigning and there is at least one person has after being banned from one campaign for cheating, was additionally banned from several others. You just take that system and scale it. You'd want to start small obviously, but you could do it I think.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Lost in Space
How do you ban governments? Isn't that what this is in response to? There are systems in place to deal with individual violators, but not with really big ones, because the big ones are the ones who set the rules in the first place.
Imagine trying to kick the NSA off the 'net.
edited 12th Mar '14 2:19:01 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
A procrastination in of itself
Yeah I think removing the government from the net wouldn't work, I'm not even sure if it would be desirable. I was more going of what Green and Tobias said, which seemed more aimed at individual people.
I mean I guess you could combine a massive anti-infiltration system with cooperation with the government, so instead of the NSA going though the hassle of infiltrating TV Tropes they'd simply submit a request for access to certain date to Eddie.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Lost in Space
We have that system now, in the form of warrants and such. The issue is that the NSA has sought (and received) power to investigate and wiretap without warrants, all justified under the PATRIOT act as counterterrorism.
When all this is explicitly legal (we have court decisions declaring it so), then there is no civil recourse, absent the voters unifying and demanding change of their legislators.
Then we come back to the problem that we aren't all in agreement about whether this kind of surveillance is good or bad, nor about what to do about it.
edited 12th Mar '14 2:35:09 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
scratching at .8, just hopin'
Interesting commentary on Edward Snowden's talk at South by Southwest. I feel the author is being optimistic about such a sea change in U.S. politics, though. Be warned that this runs the risk of straying from the original topic of this thread.
The people in one of them are dying, and not at the hands of the tyranny they dream up around them, but of sad, slow, typical death. There are no cathartic last stands on the front lawn, a man and his hunting rifle getting in a last hurrah against an ATF coming for the gun rack. There is no last-second poetry penned while withering away because the socialist gruel rations finally ran out. People are dying of the regular ol' stuff, afraid.
The other movement is adapting to the world around them. They are accepting the beauty in information and one another, instead of fearing for the sake of fear. They are on the offensive.
In Washington D.C., Sarah Palin delivered the keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday.
She literally read a children's book to adults to raucous applause. It was a modified Dr. Seuss book that she got from an email chain letter.
In that other movement, there are meetings like the one today at SXSW. They talked about the complexities of data collection — and how to synthesize it, transparently, for good. It was about exposing data collection programs to scrutiny — to uncover abuse — so it can only be used for people, not against them. It was about, as Snowden said today, "how do you interpret (these communications), how do you understand them."
All this tech talk is, invariably, filled with compassion.
It's no longer a question of if we will or will not have a better America. It's a question of how long it will take the younger and brighter and better to drown out the institution that is impeding American progress with grade school debate, bullying and pettiness. It's a question of when they will be able to communicate to America that they are the only chance at a productive future.
How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware.
The implants being deployed were once reserved for a few hundred hard-to-reach targets, whose communications could not be monitored through traditional wiretaps. But the documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.”
Oh, Crap!...
NOT THE BEES
Yeah, there's basically no plausible national defense justification for hacking targets by the millions.
scratching at .8, just hopin'
Sadly, yes, and all those back doors into people's computers make things like identity theft easier.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
Lost in Space
At least it's good to know that the NSA is forced to go through the same methods as your average criminal hacker — tricking you into installing malware. They may have more power to disrupt the Internet in service of this scheme, but they can't just magically break into any computer they please. Not yet, anyway.
I cannot help but notice the irony, though.
edited 13th Mar '14 7:29:54 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
V
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I'm sure the NSA Recruits Former Hackers.
edited 13th Mar '14 8:16:48 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On
Lost in Space
So the reason we aren't doing more to crack down on the criminal Internet underground is that the NSA uses it as a "farm league"?
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Queen of Good Things, Honest
My understanding: it's not uncommon for exceptionally talented criminals, once they've been apprehended, to be recruited by major government law agencies such as the CIA and FBI in tracking down and apprehending other such criminals like them. It goes to the logic of, "It takes a thief to catch a thief;" an expert criminal knows the way an expert criminal thinks and operates better than any law enforcer ever could.
I don't see why the NSA would be any different.
edited 13th Mar '14 8:26:49 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.
Lost in Space
I was mostly being ironic. I find it highly amusing (if a bit sad) that the NSA uses the same techniques to break into people's computers as the criminals.
edited 13th Mar '14 8:31:48 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
That testimony from Snowden was excellent. Thank you, and signal boosted.