Am I exaggerating here? The scary thing is I'm not. He's not done. It's going to get worse.

Attaching his name to this just makes it so that we all vote for a Republican next year, congratulate ourselves for getting rid of the guy who loved spying on us all, and everything stays exactly the same.

I'm not trying to defend him or say he is blameless here. I'm saying that it's bigger than who is in the President's chair at the moment, and I wish we could think about these things in a more systemic way.

The problem is systemic and cultural, the federal bureaucracy is more influential on elected officials than elected officials are on the federal bureaucracy, at least in matters of intelligence and national security.

Every politician elected into this system faces extraordinary forces of compliance, and only a few on both the left and right (Wyden, Paul, etc) seem able to resist.

This was followed by Carter signing FISA....

Regan followed, signing among other things legislation to allow the military to enforce drug laws domestically as an exemption to Posse Comitatus. This meant that the military was involved in surveillance at both Ruby Ridge and Waco, and also directly provided military equipment and in some cases personnel to these operations (in addition to Navy SEALs raiding crack houses in some cities).

Then came Clinton and things got worse again with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and some other laws.

Then came GWB, no further comment required.

And now we have Obama.

Whoever we elect screws us. That's the truth.

EXCERPT FROM

Orlov, Dmitry. “Reinventing Collapse.” New Society Publishers, 2011-04-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxsQ7jJJcEA

A fundamental impedance mismatch is the public wants/needs policies. However they're only allowed to vote on two hand picked two sides of the same coin "leaders", not the actual policies. The "winner" is the candidate who tells the best lies about policies, which will of course be forgotten after inauguration, and both are going to do the same thing anyway so it doesn't matter very much which wins.

We have to take over the conversation and stop listening to the challenger. The challenger doesn't exist. It is up/down on the incumbent.

Your suggestion is that the general public should slightly modify how they select which lie is told to them. The result will be they'll be lied to slightly differently, and no change in actual outcome.

With enough money, and it'll take a lot of money, the public could purchase their own candidates... That would be interesting, although unlikely. And there's an awful lot of intentional divide and conquer PR work already in place to prevent it.

Once wealth inequality and income inequality exceed a certain level the system spirals out of control until it crashes and reboots. In that scenario the most sensible way to limit total overall human suffering is to floor the accelerator and encourage the process, rather than hold it back, so it crashes quicker and we get back to normalcy sooner. Given that background, a lot of current events suddenly make more sense. Look at federal reserve policy, or pretty much anything in contemporary politics.

Honestly, it seems like only Al-Jazeera US might be the only independent news station.

No, its one set of political campaign donors, not two parties.

One set of donors, hires two competing PR firms masquerading as political parties, to implement two different messages aiming at the identical goal.

Its relatively effective and stable as a technology for social control. Its also effective at benefiting the people who are running it, which is obviously not the general public or humanity overall or the environment or pretty much anyone but a couple 1%ers.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cable...

As long as people are hoping for some politician to deliver them from government unaccountable to the people, its not going to happen.

> The big problem to solve is: how do you elect someone different?

Elections are important, but they aren't everything. More needs to be done to think about "how do we effectively hold those we do elect accountable".

> As long as the two parties get to decide who American can elect, democracy is a hollow gesture.

To the extent this is part of the problem, it is probably more tractable if you realize that it is a problem effecting many elections, isn't amenable to a quick one-step fix, and that elections to the Presidency aren't the best place to start.

Anyone who thought that wasn't paying attention, of course, but it's not like that's a new thing.

And it makes sense: it's not like your vote is actually going to do anything, so why bother paying attention? Just go vote if you remember, and pick the guy with the letter by his name that you voted for last time. (Can look up Ilya Somin's writings regarding "rational political ignorance" for more on that.)

Start by being intellectually curious about the person, who he is, what he has done on the past, what philosopies he is associated with. Quit labeling people who try to do this as wingnuts or racists or employing other logically fallacious arguments to try to shut down debate.

Would be more realistic to elect a third party, meaning someone who is not part of the corrupt R/D duopoly.

Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can be implemented state-by-state.

Here's hoping that people eventually figure out that better voting systems can be implemented state by state, including non-single-winner systems where appropriate (e.g., legislative elections), and single winner systems better than IRV (which is pretty much the preference voting system that does the most to preserve the problems of majority/runoff) for the places where single winner systems are still needed, as might be the case with executive elections (or not, if you reform more than just the election system.)

I prefer approval, but hey, your state can have IRV and mine can have approval and thanks to the electoral college that doesn't break things!

Unless we're in the same state, in which case we'll have to agree on something I guess.

Honestly, I'm in favor of any modifications to winner-take-all. "None of the Above" would be a major win for the protest vote, with a huge meta-electoral effect even if it never wins. And while it would boost morale and turnout for presidential years, the real effect would be seen if we elected Congress that way as well.

Basically, you check yes or no for everyone, and the winner is the one with the most "yes" votes. Less expressive than IRV, but also simpler to understand and tabulate.

Elaborate on that a bit - I know it's popular to say that Congress has a low approval rating, but no one votes for "congress" - they vote for their congresspeople, who typically have high approval ratings. There may well be other effects I'm not spotting, though...

"Dont like either of these two (expletive) - come back with better ones".

If this option comes tops in the election, both parties pay a percentage towards the cost of next round. Can't say their donors would be very happy if this shit goes on for months. Oh my god, how will we function without a government? Well, its not like the government we chose is doing/gonna do all that better.

Atleast it'll slowdown most of the shitty laws that get passed with alarming efficiency.

pj = Pamela Jones

But yeah, it's devastating -- especially when it comes just one day after a editor of the Guardian states that they can no longer report on certain topics from London.

It seems like we need entirely new communication protocols.

How about new government - one that isn't broken and tramples on all of our civil liberties? The first step is to dismantle the military industrial complex

Yeah that'll happen

Whole new enforcement of privacy laws, you mean?

While elsewhere in the comments, there is the sentiment that "you can't code yourself out of this", my hopes of voting myself out of it (or otherwise "fixing" a system, as if it was just accidentally "broken") are much lower.

(But note that "protocols" may also have non-technological components.)

It's easy to feel helpless and isolated, to feel like you can't do anything because the government is so big and you're so small. Realise that this feeling of helplessness is not based in reality. It is fostered; not by some kind of global conspiracy between government and business, but because it serves the interests of powerful people and institutions everywhere. There is no need for them to cooperate, for them to get together in shady backrooms to decide how next to disempower you. Their interests just happen to align.

But that isolation is not something you're forced into. You can break free. It's not easy, but if people suffering under military dictatorships can do it, then in our (still) relatively free society, we can do it too.

Anyone who feels like this should read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. I'm rereading it these days (relistening, actually), and while it's certainly not perfect, you'll get a lot out of the shift in viewpoint.

So you intent of fixing just a small point of the whole mess (the surveillance thing) and not the overall mess (bad governments, something that affects 100% of our life and countries)?

Not to mention there is nothing to fix this way. Everything can be outlawed, including mere use of unlocked general purpose computers as a non authorized professional in, say, 20 years time.

I think that genie is well out-of-the-bottle.

Did you see the article recently about installing linux on the microcontroller on a hard disk controller board? There's no end of "consumer electronics" that have "general purpose computers" inside them. Hell, I'm helping out some people deploying christmas lights with a half-gigahertz ARM Linux board with wifi as a controller. (hardware details here: http://dev.moorescloud.com/2013/07/06/holiday-hardware-is-op... if you're curious). They've shipped over a million RaspberryPi's in the last 16 months - they're mostly still going to be useable in 20 years time, and between now and then pretty much every toy,appliance,car,tv,phone,coffeemachine,whatever is going to contain something capable of running linux...

(In Philosophy, you'd call this position "materialist", I assume.)

And of course, as long as the current political situation in the US lasts, cloud services in the US cannot be trusted. Run your own server, or use a server abroad.

I think these systems cannot work :(

If you can make a system that is immune to traffic analysis - http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/54088903127/onion... is my own blog but I'm about to shoot it down - then you basically have an open router and the spam abuse that implies.

Any reasonably anonymous system will collapse under the weight of abuse :(

I am currently writing such a system. Some details up at circleofdistrust.com in about a month or so.

And how to measure forward rates?

All packets must be hashed and authorized ( signed ) by the server before they can be sent out. Any packet not authorized by a server will be rejected. In this way, servers will rate limit originating packets.

The traffic is distinguishable because the onion layer is identified at each level. If, after unwrapping your layer, you discover the underlying "level" is not 1 less than your own informed level, the ip origination will be flagged back to the server for spamming.

Current estimate for number of onion levels is 100. Actual destination should be somewhere in the middle 60 or so, to prevent government tracing of the packet because all hops.

At each hop, random delays will be implemented, as well as injection of extra data and/or disguising the entire packets as other forms of tcp communication. ( to prevent dropping of the packets through filtering )

The "servers" know that users are sending out origination packets at a specific rate and to whom, but nothing about the layers beyond the first. Additionally, the entire onion packet is never sent to any server, only a hash of it with specific other information. This way, "servers" can never be accused of harboring illegal data of any sort.

Forwarding rates are measured because each onion layer containing a "message of receipt" that is sent back to the server. The server receieves all of those from the originating user before approving the onion packet.

The only think attackers of the system could try to do is attempt to DDOS users of the system. This is prevented inherently by it being known at all types all users logged into the system ( this is public knowledge in the system ). Communication is only allowed from valid behaving users.

Freshly pulled-out-of-the-air suggestion – anonymous but requiring micro-payments. Say, 500 or 1000 satoshi (around a tenth of a cent) per message delivered – not as a means of generating revenue, but as a way to destroy email's current "if I only get one sale per 100,000 emails I send, that just means I need to send 10,000,000 emails a day to get my desired 100sale/day" vulnerability - if that actually cost the spammer $10,000/day, it just wouldn't happen.

('course that required having hard currency to bitcoin exchanges easy enough for the general public to use, and scalable enough to service a significant proportion of internet-using people)

Bitcoin is itself a proof-of-work system.

However, these again don't work. The abuser has ample resources to actually do the work on: a botnet.

That's not fresh. I think it may have even been entertained by Congress for a while.

- That's why I prefer to think about protocols, as opposed to a system (i.e. global implementation of one or more generalized protocols)

- You don't always have to solve the problem theoretically; solving it practically may be good enough. A system can be usable for a long time, before it collapses under abuse.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-m...

That's stupid. Of course they wouldn't. They would require them to stop reporting on the security state. But that is vastly different from shuttering them all together.

The Guardian certainly performs a public service in a variety of other domains (from which the government can and does benefit). The security state just doesn't want the press banging around in their domain.

Let's not let the hyperbole get away from us here.

The US is not Zimbabwe or Burma or Jordan. It has its serious flaws and issues that need to be addressed, but we shouldn't mistake the kind of creature that we are dealing with. Making that mistake will lead one to seriously misunderstand what the interests and possible courses of action that western governments will pursue.

Also, if one wanted to be really crabby about it, it's kind of disrespectful to all of the journalists who paid with their lives to contribute to the civic sphere to equate pervasive surveillance (as serious and insidious as it is) with the pervasive fear of physical harm and death that some journalists face.

Marcela Turati did a terrifyingly good job of conveying the price that Mexican journalists pay at the Investigative Reporters & Editors conference this year. If you really want to get a sense of that, you can watch the video here: http://ire.org/conferences/ire-2013/keynote/

I hold the liberal Western governments to higher standards though, and see the difference in degree as being eroded more easily than you suggest.

I believe in the importance of a free press, and recent developments are troubling and lead to understandable concerns about the ability of ordinary people and journalists to discuss, report on, or investigate without undue duress, potential criminal activities by rogue agents exceeding their mandate as proscribed by their democratically elected governments.