Liberty and Justice

Why don't we subject MP's to this technology too? After all, if they think it works why not show us that they have nothing to hide? But seriously, this is BS... - Halil from Bookmarklet

"Did you know that what you say on Facebook can be used against you in a court of law? If you're sharing something with your friends, you may as well be sharing directly with the judge and jury: A recent ruling in a U.S. federal court says that if you post something on Facebook, your friend can share that information with the police — it's not a violation of your privacy." - A. T. from Bookmarklet

"Vladimir Putin is rapidly transforming Russia into a repressive state reminiscent of the Soviet Union, and the Pussy Riot trial is the climax in his campaign against the opposition. However, following massive media attention, his crackdown on the punk band could backfire." - A. T. from Bookmarklet

^ Угу, но я мыслил более отвлечённо, т.е. героем мог быть быть не PR, а условный Ларри Флинт (пр которого другое кино) - 9000

"The Obama administration said today that it's moving ahead with a plan for broad adoption of Internet IDs despite concerns about identity centralization, and hopes to fund pilot projects next year. At an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C., administration officials downplayed privacy and civil liberties concerns about their proposal, which they said would be led by the private sector and not be required for Americans who use the Internet. There's "no reliable way to verify identity online" at the moment, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said, citing the rising tide of security threats including malware and identity theft that have grown increasingly prevalent over the last few years. "Passwords just won't cut it here." A 55-page document (PDF) released by the White House today adds a few more details to the proposal, which still remains mostly hazy and inchoate." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

Commerce Department or U.S. Chamber of Commerce? It is important for everyone to know the difference. - Thomas Page

"In 2009, Iranian blogger Omidreza Mirsayafi became the first blogger ever to die in prison. That year alone, a year referred to by a senior US State Department official as "the worst year in the history of the internet as it related to internet freedom", no fewer than 35 bloggers around the world languished in prison. While by no means a new phenomenon - Tunisia arrested its first blogger back in 2000 - the events of 2009 escalated risk for netizens across the world, as governments quickly awakened to the "threat" posed by bloggers and social media users. This year, as an increasing number of citizens have taken up cyber-arms, protesting online as well as on the street, governments have broadened their attacks on netizens. No longer content to simply censor content, countries like Syria and Bahrain have upped the ante, employing online propagandists and intimidating those who dare speak out online. Still others - such as Thailand -utilise draconian laws to hold online publishers... more... - sofarsoShawn from Bookmarklet

btw, that screen shot is from TJ's page, in case you recognize it - sofarsoShawn

#DMCA #SOPA #PIPA and other laws passed to protect entrenched interests (commercial and legislative power), to the detriment of the rights of individuals. - Tinfoil 2.0

The "Patriot" Act, warrantless wiretapping, increasing surveillance (cameras, drones, license plate scanners, facial recognition,... you name it). - Tinfoil 2.0

Unconstitutional assassination and indefinite detention of US citizens. - Tinfoil 2.0

Ideas that are bullet proof (tear gas proof :), armored with these ideas, they have the potential that can change the world. Why? Because most importantly they represent that you care, not simply for yourself, but for others, you see how they see, you feel how they feel and you nobly stand up. Now in honor of this most important auspicious occasion I’d like to reintroduce you to your own selves with a a simple few words that changed the course of human history. Like holding up a mirror, a reminder of the justice furnished in these ideas and demonstrated by your action. They’re altogether from a very different source but reflective of the exact same principles: “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” - V - sofarsoShawn

Denise Je ta'dore!!! et encore ta'dore!! Thoughts to the point or to the observe are seriously most welcome :) Prove me wrong as so what and and so forth from the prior augmentation which has proved fallible - sofarsoShawn

"In concluding that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant to engage in extensive GPS surveillance, the D.C. Circuit noted that '[w]hen it comes to privacy . . . the whole may be more revealing than the parts.'" - Tinfoil 2.0

"...The problem with the Court’s existing view of no privacy in public is that people often do expect privacy in public. The Court’s conception of privacy wrongly views privacy as total secrecy and fails to recognize that people often have practical obscurity in public. Let’s look past conceptions of privacy and ask a more simple question: Should the government be required to obtain a... more... - Tinfoil 2.0

"...the harms of surveillance occur regardless of where surveillance occurs. Surveillance in public can still chill behavior; it can limit people’s freedom; and it can give an enormous amount of power to the watchers... I think the Court needs to draw a line, or else technology will make the Fourth Amendment virtually irrelevant. I propose the following line be drawn: The Fourth... more... - Tinfoil 2.0

"When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. De Profundis" - sofarsoShawn from Bookmarklet

I like his quote about my home ville (that's the Franch word for town) because we're really proud of are long range nuclear missiles: “My muse is the 500 phallic nukes of this wondrous island” ~ Oscar Wilde on upon examining the nuclear arsenal of the Montreal (http://ff.im/NpyyQ) - sofarsoShawn

"In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick asks, "Will the Troy Davis case be the one that finally turns America against the death penalty?" and she concludes with the "faint hope" that it might. Here's the actual answer: oh, fuck no. See, we are a bloodthirsty nation that actually prides itself in being bloodthirsty. America exists now in a perpetual state of arrested development, stuck in a savage teenagehood: narcissistic, emotional, easily roused to uncontrollable bursts of violence, and filled with hate towards anyone who thinks differently. Just as we can be at war (do you remember that? We're at war still. Surprising, no?) with few visible consequences to the vast majority of Americans, we just don't give a fuck if a couple of innocent dudes are offed, as long as it's not our innocent family members and as long as we can keep offing the presumptively guilty ones, and don't even bother with trying to say that offing people is fucked up. That's the talk of pussies and losers. We're in the savage end days of empire, motherfuckers. Compassion is what gets you beaten down for the pennies in your pockets." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet

"This is who we are right now, America: the country that doesn't care about guilt or innocence. We fight wars based on lies, we imprison people without charges, we torture and murder the innocent. How's it feel to be that country?" - Steven Perez

The above image is a typical personal information disclosure from a bank. Notice that you only have the illusion of control over your personal information. You can "Opt Out" of being marketed to, but you can't prevent your personal information from being shared with opaque and unknown third parties. - Tinfoil 2.0

These are just examples. There are many, many more. The US desperately needs a comprehensive privacy law. The US and Turkey stand alone as the only two of the 34 OECD countries without such a law. "Any discussion of consumer privacy... must be grounded by a comprehensive set of Fair Information Practices (FIPs)": 1. Transparency 2. Participation 3. Purpose Specification 4. Data... more... - Tinfoil 2.0

"we do have an expectation of privacy in the “whole” of our public movements. “Unlike one’s movements during a single journey,” Judge Ginsburg wrote, “the whole of one’s movements over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil.” Judge Ginsburg realized that ubiquitous surveillance for a month is impossible, in practice, without technological enhancements like a GPS device" - Tinfoil 2.0

Sadly it's unavoidable in the UK, as I believe we are the most watched nation in the world. CCTV doesn't help solve crimes, so what's their true purpose? - Halil

"But whether or not it’s a good idea (it’s not), the immediate problem for the TSA is that it’s illegal. Previous case law on airport checkpoints has authorized administrative searches, but never compelled responses to administrative interrogations. Responses to police questioning in such circumstances have been presumed by courts to be voluntary. If the TSA’s Constitutional case for such interrogation is untested, their lack of statutory authority is clear." - Tinfoil 2.0

They keep trying to get away with these things, and yet they keep getting called out for it. This agency is an embarrassment to security theatre. - Dennis Jernberg

"How can I protect myself? Until we have augmented or replaced the CA system with something more secure, all of our fixes to the problem of HTTPS/TLS/SSL insecurity will be band-aids. However, some of these band-aids are important:" - Tinfoil 2.0

"4. Users of Google services in particular can choose to enable two-factor authentication, which makes it hard for attackers who steal Google passwords to reuse them later. Any user of Google service with a concrete concern that someone else wants to take over their Google accounts should consider using this protection." - Tinfoil 2.0

"A number of technologies have been touted to offer consumers control over third-party web tracking. This post reviews the tools that are available and presents empirical evidence on their effectiveness." - Tinfoil 2.0

"users dislike advertising, and ad blockers are already the most popular extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Third parties should not be so hasty to play Russian roulette with the Internet economy. And publishers should not be so willing to let them." - Tinfoil 2.0

It's a fine baby step for Google and needs to be followed by Apple, Microsoft, Skyhook, and the others. But we really need a geolocation Do Not Track capability for wi-fi access point owners. It's not good enough to "opt out" but still get databased. - Tinfoil 2.0

I love the #precrime hashtag. - Tinfoil 2.0

Me too, even if it is Tom Cruise o_O (he's insane) - Tinfoil 2.0

[via @csoghoian Christopher Soghoian This is awesome (and shameful): #DHS response to #FOIA request on nudie scanners in roving vans tinyurl.com/FOIAb5 (via @peter_watkins) https://twitter.com/#!...] - Tinfoil 2.0

Brands can increase the number of people who install their Facebook apps by 400% through a combination of private and newsfeed messaging, according to a new MIT study. The effectiveness of different Facebook strategies was determined by randomly giving users of Facebook apps different experiences and observing how activity spreads throughout the network. Researchers found the winning strategy to be up to two times more effective than email, and 10 times more effective than banner ads. Here's how it all breaks down... - sofarsoShawn from Bookmarklet

Threat Level summary here: New Yorker Sheds New Light on NSA’s Warrantless Wiretapping and Data Mining By Kim Zetter http://www.wired.com/threatl... - Tinfoil 2.0

Glenn Greenwald's analysis here: Jane Mayer on the Obama war on whistle-blowers http://www.salon.com/news... "...Read the whole thing to get the full picture of how devoted this President is to the National Security and Surveillance State he pretended to want to reform and to the preservation (and strengthening) of the sprawling secrecy regime that enables its corruption." - Tinfoil 2.0

[Testimony of Ashkan Soltani, Independent Privacy Researcher and Consultant, United States Senate, Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law Hearing] - Tinfoil 2.0

"consumers have expressed significant concern about how their devices expose sensitive information about them in ways they might not expect. Consumers need to be able to trust their devices in order to take full advantage of all the benefits mobile technology has to offer." - Tinfoil 2.0

"Many companies track where you go as you browse from site to site. Often this is done by placing ads on a wide variety of sites: if my advertisement is on a thousand sites, then I can figure out which of those thousand sites you've been to. Lots of people don't like this. In Firefox 4, we've added a feature called the "DNT Header" that lets you tell these "trackers" that you don't like it. We created this demonstration since we don't do this type of tracking at Mozilla." - Tinfoil 2.0 from Bookmarklet

Also worth repeating: "Do Not Track isn't just about Behavioral Advertising" http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node... - Tinfoil 2.0

"Free speech can’t exist unchained. US politics needs the tonic of order. If America is to speak in a way that heals, as Obama wishes, it needs the curbs and regulations that make freedom of expression real." - Alex Scrivener from Bookmarklet

via LogEx - Alex Scrivener

"The idea of a private company tracking consumer behavior and sitting in judgment of it — the idea of having an indelible and persistent "return history" that follows us from store to store and transaction to transaction, like a credit history — all without our express permission, is at base very creepy. In fact, it's the kind of Big Brother-ish customer service development that rather makes one want to avoid shopping at stores that employ it altogether." - Tinfoil 2.0 from Bookmarklet

"China outlaws Skype. VOIP phone and messaging systems have been outlawed in China with the exception of the state-owned China Unicom and China Telecom. This is a pattern in China, where the two birds of repression and protectionism nest in the same bush. The combination of eliminating competition and controlling discourse made this act inevitable. southkoreaflag.jpgSouth Korea to censor Twitter and Facebook. South Korea has reportedly issued a warning that South Koreans who post Facebook and Twitter messages and retweet messages that praise communist North Korea will face legal prosecution. cuban flag.gifLeaked cables show deeper fear of bloggers than "activists" in Cuba. A number of U.S. diplomatic cables show how little the government of Cuba fear old-style dissidents and how concerned they are over bloggers, "a group that frustrates and scares the GOC like no other." *** It almost seems like the tinhorns took a week off over the holidays and rested up their electrode-affixin' hands. Almost." - sofarsoShawn from Bookmarklet