throwaway6637

> On a more practical level, I can't remember a time my credit card has been refused for local or international transactions (and any additional fees are largely invisible to me, the consumer). Paying with a credit card also carries certain advantages: If the goods aren't delivered, I spend 2 minutes on the phone and get my money back.

I donated to wikileaks. Except I didn't, because the US put pressure on VISA+MC, and reversed my transaction. That whole business convinced me of the need for decentralised currency.

But SR was not exclusively for drug sellers.

Most of the business there was drugs, obviously, but some amount of that money would have bought legitimate items. So what gives them the right to sell off that money?

In the article.

"These are safeguards that were missing in the EU's Data Retention Directive. As a result, the Directive has been invalidated by the Court of Justice of the EU, Europe's highest court. The court said: the violation of individuals' rights was of "vast scope and particular gravity". One thing is certain: it will be have to be revised, with greater protection included for individuals."

So, we really need to protect privacy better, but we're still going to preemptively wiretap everyone in case some of them turn out to be criminals.

So... aside from the hot air, the only concrete thing I got from that press release was that the EU politicians are so pissed that the EU court struck down their draconian data retention laws that they're going to pass a new one that resolves the technicalities on which the old one was struck down.

And apparently, this is somehow going to bring the EU to "a gold standard in privacy protection". What?

The NSA does this full-time, with a large staff. They have very elaborate systems designed to automatically pull all this information and organise it into databases for easy lookup.

These guys were manually viewing wireshark dumps. Obviously they're going to spend a lot more time to get the same info when working at such a low level, with no access to any of the automation tools the NSA uses.