timbro

Of course we can put our heads in the sand.

The problem is: if you do this, you should no longer be allowed to vote. Because democracy can only survive if the feedback cycle is encouraged, not sabotaged:

(Good|bad) news => critical thinking by the citizen => citizen votes accordingly => corruption (and other problems) are corrected.

If you stop reading news, you stop being a responsible citizen.

If you feel bad about the news, there's 1 thing you should do: Channel the anger and produce positive action. It will make you feel good and problems will vanish. That is how this works.

That may be true if you're the kind of person who never stands up to anybody. If you never voice disagreement or opposition, then you can be that 100% transparent citizen.

But it's difficult or impossible to reverse this, once you've gone down that path.

And as soon as you'll feel like saying something critical, you can very easily be manipulated to remain silent, because the other party will know all your weaknesses. It will know where to attack you efficiently. (And if you take a look at our dumb and immature culture, you will notice that we still think it's ok to judge people, btw. all based on the illusion of "free will").

This story is about New Zealand, but I'm sure we agree on which government exerts the pressure that these police state tactics are about to become the new (and apparently accepted) "normal".

I really hate to see the US going down that path, it would have had so much potential to exert positive pressure, to make the World a better place.

> I always get this impression that the first day in office of a new president some guy in a black suit comes into the oval office...

If you remember that one of the pre-Snowden whistleblowers stated in an interview that Obama was among the people under targeted surveillance, then you know that all future Presidents (and some past ones probably too) are nothing more than puppets being manipulated by the real powers (which we don't see). So it's really no surprise that "promises will always be broken" - unless we understand that very profound changes in our systems are the only real solution, long-term.

No website has to have Google track their users. If you do it, you choose to do it (you're disrespecting your users).

You can get your open-source and locally running web analytics here: https://prism-break.org/

> it lets NSA home in on someone already under suspicion

Like OWS protesters, for example.

> Sheriff Bud York suggested, according to the Post-Star, the local newspaper, that “in an era of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and mass killings in schools, police agencies need to be ready for whatever comes their way...

And in reality, they're just preparing for social unrest that seem more likely by the day.

> the NSA and its British counterpart defeat encryption technologies by working with chipmakers to insert backdoors, or cryptographic weaknesses, in their products.

I had already started to forget about that...

From that other report (september):

> They reveal a highly classified program codenamed Bullrun, which according to the reports relied on a combination of "supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders, and behind-the-scenes persuasion" to undermine basic staples of Internet privacy, including virtual private networks (VPNs) and the widely used secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) protocols.

Reminds me of the story about that Canadian woman who can never access US soil again, because of her medical data.

> My grandfather tells me not to write open source software because I don't get paid for it

Yeah, these are the values of the rat race culture we've been nurturing so far. And look where that has taken us. Sanity?

> It’s a cargo cult: people do it because everyone else is doing it.

And that's one of the core problems of our society. The seed is planted by commercial interests we cultivate in our culture (the rat race for more money than your peers) and it grows, because we don't choose cooperation (as in "open-source software") over competition.

"NOTHING IS BEYOND OUR REACH" says their tag line.

Let that sink in for a minute.

It's the mindset of crazies.

That's the point.

95% of the population has absolutely no clue about how technology works and how it will be used against them, sooner or later.

OTOH, when you just turn off the link to cell towers, you gain huge amounts of battery time - quite nice.

I think it's becoming very clear now:

Either the NSA/government goes or technology goes.

If we want to attain a sane degree of democracy in our Western world, both can not continue to coexist in their current form.

When I read about the NSA tracking mobile phones worldwide, I decided to put my mobile "phone" in flight mode - permanently.

It's a PDA now. All you need to do is tell your people to call you on your landline. Like we did a few years back. (Reminder: it was actually possible to live like that - plus, you're not on an electronic leash anymore, it feels really good.)

Why focus on Snowden again?

The fact of the matter is: We have clearly seen that the governments have been lying to us the whole time.

And of course they will ultimately make some promises.

But it's too late for promises. Nobody trusts the governments anymore. Their degree of corruption is painfully obvious.

As long as there are agencies like the NSA/CIA with the insane budgets we give them, the abuse will continue (best case: it will be slowed down temporarily).

I like the idea and the effort.

One thing I hate about it, though:

Again, third party javascripts are loaded in the background (Google, as usual, for example).

Come on people, you know this tracks everybody around the entire Web, stop using those scripts (is it so hard to use local js scripts? For example, find local "Web analytics" here: https://prism-break.org/).

What you're asking your users to do here is: telling Google (and the NSA, etc.) about your health problems. Not smart. At all.

> And our reaction is always the same - shock and horror

And more importantly, nothing significant ever happens.

It all continues and we think "it's gonna be ok", "they will do something, I mean, they have to, right?", "I mean, we're not in a sci-fi movie or anything"...

As far as I've understood, back when I was in school, this is exactly the attitude/mood/behavior/culture which gave the Nazis a chance to become what they became.

> The NSA does not target Americans’ location data

and

> ...location data are obtained by methods “tuned to be looking outside the United States,”

Whew, I was getting worried, but now I'm sure we're safe and it's just for foreigners.

Reintroduction of fascism: My money's on the brits.

Are we talking about "internet fora" like HN?

So it's basically the messaging part of http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/