In a sanitized or controlled scenario, this makes sense. Passion and emotion, however, are impossible to strip from opinions in the context of the Snowden revelations that started all of this. Having the scab ripped off the NSA has altered the perspective of entire generations. Frankly I think the students handled themselves remarkably well.
They handled themselves pretty well for the first half of that conversation, with some intelligently phrased questions. Unfortunately, during the second half of the clip, the conversation degenerated into petty childishness.
The 'Nobel' as you put it encompasses multiple fields, most of which are based in sciences proven by empirical analysis. The 'Peace' prize has historically been controversial as contributions to peace are inherently political in nature.
Please don't disregard the other prizes: they represent real, quantifiable achievements. Peace is a simple result from political policies, but chemistry, physics, and medicine have a rich history of research and application.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is actually distinct from the "real" Nobels. It is also even more of a joke than the Peace Prize, often.
The Prize in Literature's never free of the usual political recriminations either - there's a fine line between endorsing a message and acknowledging execution (and the fact that the ends an author sets plays an important role as well) that's never been fully articulated.
Again, we are not the police and not a court of law. Authorities can and do require access to customer data from time to time in a way justified by local law; we comply with the law in those cases.
Really?! And what are you suggesting your principled stance is going to be when they shove a law in your face that violates and contradicts another law or an edict or the US Constitution you grew up believing was sacrosanct?
The problem is that they make any law they want to make, then keep it secret. Then they enforce the law they just made, forcing you into a position where you either have to give them the middle finger or subject your business to the possibility of being shut down - legally. Should you decide you want to challenge the enforcement of a law you believe is illegal, on behalf of one of your customers, you can't tell the press, you can't have an open proceeding in view of public scrutiny, and you can't inform your customer of the challenge. When the ruling eventually comes down (from a court who's sworn to as much secrecy as the agency you were fighting), you aren't even allowed to share that with anyone either.
I applaud what you probably believe is a line in the sand. But we can't even get to the real debate of privacy until we are allowed to challenge the very instruments that lay claim to authority over us... in public. It's that simple.
That's exactly why the users can no longer trust the service or the government to do right by them. Client-side encryption is the only way to be sure your rights aren't being trampled.
In practice, taking the Constitution (of whatever country) into their own hands would just lead to the entire company getting shut down over one customer.
Yes, I am surprised at how quiet they've been this week. Must've grown tired of having every new denial answered with a new document showing them to be lying again.
In a way that is good indicator that they are beginning to worry their timing so as limit the political damage from the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
> I don't understand how this argument that the constitution of a country (which represents its highest thoughts and ideals) can be applied selectively (i.e., only to citizens). If the thoughts contained therein regarding the rights of human beings are indeed 'True', then surely they should apply to all human beings?
You'll get little argument from most 'Mericans for your statement that these rights are human rights. The argument you will get is the rationality of transference. The difference between the OP and any American is citizenship and history.
US citizens of today are beneficiary to a Constitution that was crafted and bled for, over 200 years ago, with nasty war for our independence and claim to self governance. I didn't fight this battle. My father didn't fight this battle. Neither did his father. But one of the dumb-luck results of not only being born in the US to American citizens, are the benefits bestowed upon me by the war that was fought for the benefit of future generations (i.e. ME).
Now... this is going to sound really pointed and "f* y", but there's no other way to say it. Those 200+ year old men and women didn't fight this war for people in other countries, they did it for their own sons, daughters, and many generations that would come.
I agree! Those rights that were fought for should be universal human rights for every single person on the planet. But that's why you have to fight whatever government collects your taxes for those very rights on your own.
But that's why you have to fight whatever government collects your taxes for those very rights on your own.
Why? It's not the government collecting my taxes that is reading my emails and generally spying on my communications, it's the US'. How does fighting it help me?
I hear the point. Seriously I do. But the Constitution the US is bound by is not an agreement between the US government and citizens of the world. It's an agreement between the US government and the citizens for whom it claims jurisdiction. It's scope and application is not only limited, but intentionally and wisely limited. Were it not, we would be imperial Britain and we all know how that worked out.
I think you are missing the point here: My government (Germany) already grants those rights, maybe even more rights than the US. But this doesn't mean anything when I'm using a service provided by an US company over which my government doesn't have any jurisdiction. What the US government says by its position and in the age of internet and cloud computing is the following: The moment any non-US citizen is using a service provided by an US company, he is giving up any right to due process, privacy and data security (as far as this service is concerned). Which is risky and short-sighted to say the least.
That's just it; our Icelandic friend at WikiLeaks didn't lose due process. A valid warrant was issued, that's essentially the end of story; that's all the protections U.S. citizens get, after all.
I do agree that there needs to be a framework for how "data privacy" works in the Cloud Era, but it's important to keep in mind that it's not as if the law was meant to be that uneven toward foreigners, the law is essentially still from a time when there was no such thing as a Cloud, and "search & seizure" actually meant something physically present was found and seized.
The law doesn't (in general) permit taking property in the U.S. belonging foreigners abroad, for instance, so it was not as if the legislators all had their "FUCK U EUROPE" pens out when they were drafting the laws.
What we need are bilateral treaties that cover this situation. Perhaps something like a Most Favored Nation status between nations that specifies what kind of warrant requirements would exist for a given foreign national.
But then again, how do you determine the nationality of the user behind a given IP address in the modern world?? :-/
> The moment any non-US citizen is using a service provided by an US company, he is giving up any right to due process, privacy and data security (as far as this service is concerned). Which is risky and short-sighted to say the least.
I realize this is a crappy response, but the only solution is to not use the services of countries whose laws do not explicitly protect you. As a US citizen, I refuse to use any services that can avoid that are provided by China for this very reason. (aside from the fact that I can't read Chinese.)
But... it's really, really important you understand something else here... The rights and protections you are correctly suggesting are NOT granted to you because of the limited scope and application of our Constitution, are the exact same rights and protections of mine, as a US citizen, that are currently being violated. Were I a citizen of another country, I would be just as, if not more, incensed about what has been claimed about the privacy rights of my data recently. But imagine what it's like to have grown up in a country where the guarantee of these rights is so ingrained in our minds that they are barely (almost NEVER) questioned, to find out that they are being violated at will and without the legal right to challenge or even the right to know what those violations are.
I can not even begin to articulate to you the degree of uncontainable rage I and many, many people I know have regarding what is going on right now. I can't recall a single time in my entire life, which is not an insignificant number, that I have been more angry or concerned about anything. NOT F!*&%$ ONCE!
Thanks. I was also alluding to the service being compromised in the future though. i.e., whether or not they've come up with something new, above and beyond the usual assurances.
One of the items I'm going to be most interested in from your service (when the time comes for you guys to start working on it) will be the TOS and/or practices you put in place.
I've been a ViprVPN customer before. I had a question or perhaps it was an issue I called them about and the person I was communicating with told me what VPN server I last connected to and when I connected. Sure, to do any kind of troubleshooting, this would have been necessary and important information. But I was concerned enough about the unsolicited disclosure that I cancelled the service immediately.
DuckDuckGo can claim a reasonably high interest in protecting my privacy because they simply do not collect data that the big search engine does. Collecting and storing this data would make them a target for undisclosed, unchallengeable, and unwarranted surveillance. This has enormous appeal to me.
Having said that, have you guys discussed (loosely) what data you will be collecting?
Our goal for the privacy service is to collect as little as possible. (the corp service is totally separate tech and infrastructure and has user-configurable logging). We're trying to figure out what the absolute minimum is. We're also looking at Bitcoin and other forms of payment.
For a $5-10/mo VPN, we're probably going to handle most problems by "open a new account, here's a service credit", so we don't actually need to debug much. We have a vested interest in collecting the minimum information possible so there's no point in subpoenaing it from us.
Without having visited your URL, or read your TOS, or evaluated your service for ease of use / viability, I will tell you right now that I would gladly pay a cost equivalent to what I pay monthly for broadband for a VPN service that's reliable and can protect 100% of my Internet traffic in transit. (Exit point, destination points are a whole 'nother animal.)
So, since you sound like a somewhat higher end user:
1) What platforms do you care about? Do you mainly need service from one fixed location, or from home/office network plus mobile?
2) How close does it need to get to the endpoints? We have 4 exit nodes right now; we'd probably need ~50+ to be very close to most services. There's still a portion which is "in the clear" (although, use https...), but it becomes very impractical for NSA or especially others to passively tap all those locations (since they wouldn't be IXes necessarily, and intra-colo links don't get routed through buildings like ATT 611 Folsom St.
There are 3 platforms I care about, Windows, Android, and Linux.
For the last 2 weeks I've been taking actions that attempt to pull-back my public footprint and re-exert control over my privacy (admittedly illusory) to a point where I feel more comfortable. One of the biggest "oh crap" moments was when I realized my phone is powered by software derived from a Google product.
Windows desktop should be straight forward enough to connect.
Personal Linux server farm with services that are open to the general Internet, but for outbound traffic not related to something I serve, my servers are at the mercy of the security of the feed I have.
As far as how close it has to be to an exit, I'm completely indifferent. There are trade-offs that I'm willing to accept (in some cases, extreme) as I record over 20 years of habitual internet behavior.
If you have a Galaxy Nexus S or similar you could try the FirefoxOS image, the base Linux system on there is quite simple and everything seems to be available in Github. Of course you still have the baseband to worry about, but apart from a few OMAP850s you're going to have a hard time getting away from that.
Actually, with sufficient BGP peering, you can probably reach most major destinations with far less than 50 (CDNs do), and you increase the likelihood that traffic never traverses a telco backbone.
This is frustrating and it's a false choice. "The Internet" is otherwise known as the people who were most likely to purchase an XBox 1 before hearing about the draconian DRM policies. If the XBox 360 were a horrible product, MS would have heard very very little from "The Internet".
Who they heard from was a fan base who very much still enjoy their XBox 360s and were truly looking forward to an improved product with some sick innovations that only companies like Microsoft can deliver. They heard from this collection of people because in addition to the excellent innovations, they tacked on completely unreasonable restrictions that make the product all but completely useless if you CHOSE not to connect it to the network or have the spying eye watching your every move, and then twisted themselves into a pretzel trying to either make these sound like a feature instead of handcuffs or failing to explain that you could turn off the advanced features of the Kinect.
In response to hearing from "The Internet", instead of actually listening to what was being said and making some reasonable changes to the restrictions, they stopped dead in their tracks, turned 180 degrees, then killed many of the innovations that could have been modified while still providing consumers with an actual choice.
I'm sooooo tired of being told I'm too stupid to understand something. By my government, and by big companies who once commanded my respect.
Love her or hate her, Rachael Maddow said of Hastings tonight (paraphrased from memory) "There are a lot of journalists who hope to be or claim to be fearless in their reporting. Michael Hastings was fearless. Most people got the impression after talking to him briefly that he wasn't like everyone else -- you were NOT going to be able to ignore him."
He was an infrequent guest on Up with Chris Hayes. I remember fast forwarding through most guests verbal essays to listen to his.
He'll be sorely missed... in an era when we need people like him the most.
