Text 13064, 183 rader
Skriven 2008-03-17 15:14:23 av Jeff Bowman (1:229/500)
Kommentar till text 12968 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
Ärende: Re: Google and Gmail
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Mv>JB> Because, as misguided as the country may be at the moment, I know
Mv>JB> that Americans are still protected under free speech laws.
Mv> Are they? What is that protection worth if it can be set aside by simply
Mv> labelling the suspect as a terrorist?
To a very large degree, I do still feel that free speech is fairly well
protected here. Some things violate that right, such as the Digital Millenium
Copyright Act even, which could send me to jail if I decided to have a
conversation with you about the technical details of something as now
commonplace as DVD decryption. But the truly important protections are still
there for people, I feel.
Just the other day there were large simultaneous protests in a few cities with
a few thousand people against the war. At the same time, smaller groups across
the entire globe were protesting Scientology. For most people, free speech
still applies. It's when you get into the stickier subjects that it becomes
tricky. Which shouldn't be the case, of course, but it's not going to be
solved under the current administration.
Mv> And maybe you trust the present government. But what about the leaders
Mv> that will rule in five or ten years? Can they be trusted? Mind you they
Mv> will have the data gathered by this government.
As I pointed out, I already know the government is/has harvested internet data
regardless of what individual companies like Google do. This is why it doesn't
concern me much, now or in the forseeable future. And this is just the spying
we actually know about. There's nothing I can personally do to avoid having my
online traffic spied on if the government chooses to do so, short of encrypting
all my traffic through a server in another country.
And unless they plan on using it to arrest me for downloading television shows
or trivial stuff like that, I'm not doing anything that I need to hide. That's
not to say I don't want and expect privacy, however. I just have to (again)
trust that the government is only using their technology to watch the real
criminals.
Mv> When I lived in South Africa in the mid seventees, there was the Anti
Mv> Terrorist Act. It allowed the government to arrest and detain people for
Mv> 90 days with charging them and keep them in total isolation. Without any
Mv> duty to inform their family. After the 90 days it could be extended for
Mv> another 90 days. Ad inifinitum. People just disappeared.
*snip*
Mv> Then, in the seventees the whole world condemned South Africa for it.
Mv> Now.. the US does the same and you trust your government....
As cliche and/or arrogant and/or naive as it might sound, I would say "those
kinds of things don't happen in America". And then I cross my fingers in hopes
that I don't end up looking stupid one day if it does.
To my knowledge, no average person has disappeared or ended up somewhere like
Guantanamo.
Mv>JB> Therefore, I just don't worry about it. If they want to know what
Mv>JB> I've been up to bad enough, they don't need Google to do it. They'd
Mv>JB> just illegally wiretap and search the home, then deal with the
Mv>JB> paperwork later.
Mv> And how does that differ from what happened in South Africa in the
Mv> seventees?
Because when such things are brought to the attention of the American public,
they tend to make a stink about it, and wouldn't risk the same sort of
retribution one would in South Africa when they speak up. Sometimes the police
screw up and go into the wrong home and things of that sort, and we hear about
it. There's still a line to cross with the American public, regardless of what
some of the laws Bush and his friends have allowed for. If me or anyone I knew
had their home illegally searched, I would make sure the media and internet
knew about it as much as I could. Here in the south, where some people still
tend to leave their doors unlocked in some areas, having someone barge into
your house is very much frowned upon. Possibly more so than in other places.
Mv> I know the stated reasons. History is full of cases where the stated
Mv> reasons for collecting them in the first place differs from what is
Mv> eventually done with the data.
Mv> The original purpose of storing telephone call records was to help
Mv> resolve billing disputes....
And while those records can be used for bad, I'm positive they've been used for
countless more good reasons to catch criminals. I believe they were even able
to use those to catch that Spitzer fellow who was just recently accused of
messing around with callgirls. One less shady fellow in the government.
Mv>JB> As far as I'm concerned, anything and everything passing over the
Mv>JB> internet is read without a court order.
Mv> Not here. I think...
I didn't just mean by governments either, mind you. Many places along the
chain can be compromised in lots of different ways by someone up to no good.
That's not to mention just your average snoop at a company who has access to
email and such. I knew an idiot who worked at the local cable company who was
using a simple Windows password viewer application to get account passwords.
Trust me, he was far from being a hacker. Just your average goober who thought
he was being cool. And he got fired for it. But my point is, I'd never assume
something is private unless I intentionally make it so.
Mv> My government does not have the equivalent of the Gitmo Hotel...
And neither will ours I bet once we get that abomination out of office that we
have now.
Mv>JB> Child porn sites should just be null-routed and killed globally
Mv>JB> without monkeying with DNS on a country to country basis.
Mv> Really? And who would decide what is to be labelled "child porn"?
Mv> Things like that always look easy and straightforward at first sight. Who
Mv> could be against blocking child porn? But think a bit further...
My optimistic impression of such an organization would be a panel of people who
decided on what constituted a child porn site in the first place, and then had
to have some sort of majority decision on whether an IP was to be blocked.
Mv>JB> There should be a universal group who is capable of investigating
Mv>JB> and handling such things.
Mv> And of course you would not mind if that group was led by the president
Mv> of Iran would you?
A number of people from various places would be best, actually. But the
president of Iran, no. He's too busy ensuring the world that there's no such
thing as homosexuality in Iran to take up a second job, anyway.
Mv>JB> Of course, one could argue that maybe that gives such a group too
Mv>JB> much power, possibly letting them use it on unrelated sites,
Mv> Which of course is exactly what will happen. If the system is in place to
Mv> globally block sites at the push of a button why stop at child porn? Let
Mv> us block all hard porn. Who can be against that?
Mv> And while we are at it, block sites relating to drugs as well. Or
Mv> abortion. Or homosexuals. Or guns....
If you believe the internet is safe from such people with those types of goals,
you're actually mistaken. The internet is a very fragile and old piece of
technology. It's held together practically by bandaids, more and more so as it
ages and grows.
Pakistan recently decided they didn't like some videos that Youtube had up
(they were "offended"), and moved to block their citizens from accessing the
site. They modified their routing tables to reroute the site to another IP
inside their country to block it. Except their ineptitude let their changes to
leak to the outside world's routing tables. For about two hours, the entire
world was unable to access Youtube. In fact, the attempts were all being
directed right into Pakistan, since that's where they changed it to flow to.
Their entire country's internet was flooded and became unusable. Which is kind
of funny in a way, to think there's enough Youtube visitors alone to kill a
country's internet.
Anyway, the point is, routing tables of this sort came to be due to the
limitations of the number of IP addresses. They needed a new way to divide up
subnets into smaller pieces. A very vulnerable system is what we got as a
result. That's not to mention how easy it already is to poison DNS servers for
a similar less-global goal. Or the fact that you could hammer the actual
global DNS servers, of which there are only about a dozen, and effectively take
down the internet as most people use it. If someone wants to cause trouble,
they'll find a way to do it, regardless of what scale they want to do it on.
Back to the actual subject though, one would expect some sort of oversight on
any changes an organization against child porn would implement. And besides,
it would probably be somewhat easy to actually see what was being blocked.
Also, domain name providers already retain the "right" to shut down websites
which they don't deem suitable. ratemycop.com got a lot of bad press lately,
and Godaddy shut it down. That was far from child porn. One could argue who
gives them that right? Should it not be up to ICANN or someone larger? It's
all a tricky thing. It's why I feel there should be a single global process
one should have to go through, instead of allowing individual companies to
decide what's right and wrong.
--- D'Bridge 2.99
* Origin: FyBBS (1:229/500)
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