Posts by Sir Runcible Spoon 5770 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
"Any idea what this was meant to mean?..."
I was wondering that, have worked at ISPs for years, still no idea what he means.
There was a logic fail in his rhetoric as well.
Firstly he proposes a default on filter to protect the young, then goes on to say that they need to ban porn that promotes violence towards women because it damages the young.
HOW CAN IT DAMAGE THE YOUNG IF YOU'VE FILTERED IT YOU ARSEHOLE!?
Apologies for jumping in at the top.
I urge everyone to leave their connection as-is when they offer you to 'option' to turn the filter off.
Then I would urge everyone here to use a workaround and spread the knowledge of how to do so far and wide.
Deny them their list, and educate the plebs on how to circumvent their pathetic censorship rules.
The time to take a stand is NOW.
PS If I stop posting for more than a week, you can assume I'm rotting in some prison somewhere without any rights.
It's clear that the technology to track everyone is now in place, and governments/TLA organisations are reluctance to put any restraints on what they do, so unless the great unwashed can tear themselves away from Eastenders or Coronation Street (don't know what the equivalent is in the states) there isn't a lot we can do about that.
However, having all this information is one thing, having _access_ to this information is another.
The access to such data should be compartmentalised so that it requires a court order to view it, and the search criteria must be clear and precise, i.e. no fishing trips just because some bloke you thought was a terrorist is just a curious scholar so you start trawling his internet feed for fetishist porn sites and get him on some spurious charge just so you don't look like an agency drunk on power and out of control.
You have one organisation that holds the data, with no access to it.
You have a public organisation (such as the judiciary) issue the warrants.
You have one organisation that can access the data with that approval.
Organisations 1 and 3 can be as secret as they like, as long as organistation 2 is publicly accountable for the cock-ups (and if they're bad (like shooting an innocent man for an expired visa) then it means jail time).
This is nowhere near likely at the moment, but it is something I would support. As much as I dislike all this spying on citizens I am a pragmatist, and I believe such an approach could appease both sides whilst not giving both sides everything they want.
The public want no spying, or total oversight of any spying
The agencies want total spying with no oversight
At the moment we are in a situation closely resembling the latter. We need a middle ground to aim for or we'll get nowhere.
I'm not political in the sense I support one party over another, but I do believe in the common good. However, this needs to be tempered with controls on the power that the people mandate their 'masters' with. Otherwise we should just accept that we are living in a false democracy and get on with ratting out the neighbours for letting their cat shit where it likes.
I think this is a great idea.
I would also like to propose another idea - armoured drone competitions.
You build a drone, fly it around Deer Trail, and if you can get it back to your landing strip you win. If it gets shot down, you lose.
The more armor you put on, the less manoeuverable etc. so there is a balance here. I think a new sport has just been born!
Back in '98 I had amy card cloned in Europe and someone in Germany bought £3k worth of stuff with it.
Luckily I had used a credit card and company issued me with a new number and set my balance back to what it should have been in under a week.
So yeah, debit cards in untrustworthy places...no.
Every time one of these spying weasels issue a press release denying their involvment, they always use the qualifying word "directly".
Which basically is a tacit admission that they allow it "in-directly" - and you can spin that however you like since it is a very woolly term, a bit like "and at a bare minimum of expense to john q taxpayer".
He [W] might well have said 'protect civil liberties' when he instigated it, but there is another government in power now who don't seem to be following those rules.
Let me be clear, spying on your neighbours and then trading that information with another power so that they can give you their info on your own populace IS THE SAME AS SPYING ON YOUR OWN POPULACE.
To suggest anything else smacks of sophistry.
Doesn't the constitution of the US supercede the laws?
I.e. it is possible to perform an illegal act for a higher good.
There ARE higher ideals than those represented by the LAW you know.
If the US made it illegal to disobey orders, and then ordered you to commit an atrocity - surely refusing is the correct thing to do. To do otherwise would be a traitor to your humanity.
Personally I think it's news when the entire justification (since 9/11) for this wire-tapping is TERRORISM.
I don't recall anyone saying anything along the lines of
"We must make sure we have the upper hand when negotiating trade agreements with the EU in order to prevent terrorism".
It's all bollocks and you can't believe a word they say.
"Governments have always taken an interest in anybody who is a criminal, an agent of a foreign power, and of groups of individuals who protest or work against the state."
You've missed a group of people off that list:-
Law abiding citizens who do not agree with government policy and are unhappy that their elected officials constantly ignore the mandate upon which they were elected (i.e. GIVEN power).
Also people who don't like their every move mapped onto some database just in case it falls into the wrong hands.
You simply cannot argue this is all for our own good when RIPA was abused so quickly and thoroughly by petty officials of all political stripes.
It is, quite simply, too much power to put in too few hands - and there are lots of people not happy about that.
Whether there are enough people who are unhappy and are prepared to do something about it is another question. In a democracy, I have a vote. However, if my vote cannot in any way change the things I don't like, what course of action is left?
This isn't about someone revealing that the American government are spying on other governments - this is a given, as is the reverse.
What this is about is the American government spying on the populace (eg the UK) and then handing over data wholesale to our own spooks.
This creates an us & them situation that history tells us will end in blood. Lots of it.
"I don't worry about government spooks reading my emails, because unless I am doing something REALLY bad they won't bother to even have a person look at it... But I do care about my emails being read by anyone else..."
I'm sorry, but this attitude is starting to really irritate my penis.
YOU ARE A FUCKING MORON sir.
What happens, let's say, if the government of this country takes us in a direction that you don't particularly like - such as invading a neutral country for their oil and killing thousands of their citizens, and then leaving them in a worse mess than when they were in in the first place.
Let's say your brother is in the Army, dedicated to defending his country, his family and all the values imbued therein and gets killed in a pointless waste that looks like an effort to line some big-wigs already overwhelmed bank account.
Let's say you start a conversation with your cousin saying you're not happy about this state of affairs and you send this by email.
Suddenly not only are all your communications being monitored (because they were anyway) but now they are being _looked_ at.
All this spying has one aim - to quell dissidence in their own country.
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