Sooo, I've been sharing with the people who listen my history, thought it would be nice to post for them the source (all fabricated for sure):
http://i.imgur.com/CqXXAvD.png
Dropbox hack:
http://i.imgur.com/0NeIfJH.png
Fight the NSA? Hide?
Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
I understand what you wrote and what the other guy wrote. However I don't understand what you expect from us here.
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delinquent
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Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
What we really need to do is look at meshnets. There's already some in place, and I'm thinking about starting a larger one that costs £1.99 or $2.60 per month to subscribe to. Whilst being a damned cheap subscription, it would pay my hosting fees and make me about 50p profit on top.
That's the way the ISP business plan should be. Makes just a little profit, and does it's job.
Here is a link to some more information about meshnets, and how to set one up. The principle idea is excellent, now the topology just needs some development and a dedicated DNS to get truly underway.
No doubt someone will crack it sooner or later though.
That's the way the ISP business plan should be. Makes just a little profit, and does it's job.
Here is a link to some more information about meshnets, and how to set one up. The principle idea is excellent, now the topology just needs some development and a dedicated DNS to get truly underway.
No doubt someone will crack it sooner or later though.
Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25743074delinquent wrote:What we really need to do is look at meshnets. There's already some in place, and I'm thinking about starting a larger one that costs £1.99 or $2.60 per month to subscribe to. Whilst being a damned cheap subscription, it would pay my hosting fees and make me about 50p profit on top.
That's the way the ISP business plan should be. Makes just a little profit, and does it's job.
Here is a link to some more information about meshnets, and how to set one up. The principle idea is excellent, now the topology just needs some development and a dedicated DNS to get truly underway.
No doubt someone will crack it sooner or later though.
Its cool to have some meshnet, but if the NSA can get on your computer without internet then what is the point ?
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delinquent
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Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
This is a scare story.
In reality, the NSA would not likely divulge this to a production company, as it potentially allows whistleblowers. The real story is more likely to be the following:
The NSA have fitted thousands of aftermarket transmitters to computer and mobile equipment belonging to some of it's most important investigative subjects. This was likely conducted in a sweep operation, such as those seen in CSI and other detective unit shows.
This basically means that they have fitted short range transmitters to a select number of devices that are actually relevant to ongoing investigations. It's unlikely that they'll be able to be monitored by anything other than a receiving device located within 500 metres of the target. I.E, a van on the street.
In reality, the NSA would not likely divulge this to a production company, as it potentially allows whistleblowers. The real story is more likely to be the following:
The NSA have fitted thousands of aftermarket transmitters to computer and mobile equipment belonging to some of it's most important investigative subjects. This was likely conducted in a sweep operation, such as those seen in CSI and other detective unit shows.
This basically means that they have fitted short range transmitters to a select number of devices that are actually relevant to ongoing investigations. It's unlikely that they'll be able to be monitored by anything other than a receiving device located within 500 metres of the target. I.E, a van on the street.
Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
Oops, sorry didn't make it clear, this was just to post background pics (and alert anyone who thinks dropbox is secure) and as a trivia, never been hacked before so thought I'd share. Don't think anyone can do anything about it really. Political pressure is also unlikely to help, they'll close the NSA and just move the people/infra to a different 3 letter agency. The P2P spam thing could make it unaffordable for them though (bit worried about what would happen with lags on the other hand, it's not pipes, but still, network saturation with garbage data for the NSA servers to fill up will most likely decrease performance of the 'lagless' servers even more, is privacy worth sacrificing all low-latency pastimes? as a tron addict really hard to say)takburger wrote:I understand what you wrote and what the other guy wrote. However I don't understand what you expect from us here.
Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
Today I read Günther Anders' book The obsolescence of humankind. It's such an illuminating work, although it was written 30 years ago, and it's outrageous that it hasn't been translated to English yet. I now see many of these things, the NSA, Merkel, the internet, capitalism, social networks, psychology and consumption, in a different light. And that was just after this particular chapter.
Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
Sounds like you might have a career in translation ahead of you!Word wrote:...it's outrageous that it hasn't been translated to English yet.
Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
Yes, I did think about that. But perhaps I should create something new and update some of the thoughts there first. I really have a feeling like this is to our time what Marx was to the first quarter of the 20th century.
For now I will just summarize and translate some of the main thoughts of the chapter about the obsolescence of privacy, which seems to be the most important one at this time:
1) Anders uses reality shows to illustrate how social situations like "visiting" and "encountering" are transformed to processes of consumption, in which one person is the "delivery"/"consumed" and one is the "receiver"/"consumer". We all are the eaters and food of the Others. This is cannibalism.
2) We don't always know that we are about to be "consumed"/"delivered". This part is about wire-tapping. He argues that many people don't take surveillance seriously because they think being recorded doesn't have any effect on their selves: Even if their voices and looks are reproduced, it's supposedly just a phantom-like doppelgaenger. He denies this for the following reasons:
2a) It's wrong that the 'originals' of the items whose reproductions are delivered to us can keep their original form - that they stay those which they "are". Instead, they are already changed by their reproduction, even by their readiness to be reproduced.
The example he uses is a court sitting that wouldn't happen the way it does if it wasn't broadcasted and watched by an audience consisting of millions of people.
2b) "Today's thief steals without stealing, because he is 'only' a thief of images".
It is not true that those who watch/listen to us and record our remarks in some way only experience/have available reproductions of us. Even if they "only" own a reproduction of our voices, this "only" means practically nothing, because thanks to the things we said, they have these things at command, and through these, they have us too. With that being said, we are truly susceptible to blackmail and in control of others, because reproductions of us are in control of others. It is wrong to think that we are unaffected although we are bereaved and deprived. Anders says it is important to repeat this because this enforced indolence is one of the biggest lies of our epoch. Because a thief can now steal images of people and things instead of people and things, he can always claim that it wasn't 'actual' theft to make himself feel comfortable, and this isn't an isolated case but true for all of us. We all like to explore the stores of the world and take with us the things we like, and nobody would think that by reproducing them with a camera, we commit a crime. The business man whose telephone is wire-tapped still has his wallet. The girl which is photographed in an embarrassing pose without her knowledge isn't raped - nothing seems to have happened aside from a few more meters of films and images and audiotapes.
2c) It's not just us, the victims, who are clueless about what is happening and live on without feeling a loss - the same goes for the thieves, since they have their prey, yet no real object in their hands. The grandchildren of the straight bandits of the past create a indistinct situation in which, even if that may sound paradox, the absence is absent. And thanks to that, they keep doing what they do without regret. If they are confronted with their deeds they can always refer to the same alibi: not their own, but that of the victims: For we are still here and didn't experience a loss.
Nothing is more difficult than comprehending the connection between the current state of tech/science and moral*. We haven't learned this yet, and that's why the suggestion that the reproduction processes of our time are responsible for the depravation of our conscience, our sense of guilt, does sound absurd at first. We have to learn this now:
3) All machines that can be used for surveillance are totalitarian.
Nothing is more misleading than "philosophy of science" - the assumption that objects are "morally neutral", that it only matters how they are used - morally or amorally, humanely or inhumanely, democratically or antidemocratically - because it makes it look as if the moral judgement, the articulation of the moral problems, has always to follow, not to precede, the technological progress; a moral philosopher's job is at best reduced to approve an already existing machine and explaining what it should be used for, and for what it shouldn't. This is an illusion.
4) Any apparatus is already defining a kind of usage as soon as it functions, and plays a prejudicating role (politically, socially, morally, economically etc.) because of its specific working performance [Word: for example atomic weapons/military drones are in any case more deathly than, say, normal tanks - I guess that's what he means. He says he wrote more about this in the first part, which I haven't read yet]. The example he gives is once again TV consumption: No matter if you watch cable news, a reality show or a movie - there is no question that TV consumption shapes and distorts people and prejudicates their relationship with the world.
5) Once people are controllable and "deliverable" ("edible", see above), or seen and treated as beings that may be "delivered", and once they live like "edible"/"deliverable" beings, there is no freedom - regardless of the political system, regardless of who exactly is edible/deliverable. Thus it is contradictory to think that freedom can be upheld by using these surveillance methods. Anders compares this to the thought that it would be possible to modernize coal- and oil energy production thanks to nuclear power in order to avoid that nuclear power triumphes over the other two.
6) Why are objects used for surveillance always totalitarian? Because they at least modify, perhaps even extinguish a metaphysical fact that opposes the totalitarian entitlement: Individuation - that man, like every other being, is first and foremost a discretum, something singular and individual - at first, everyone is a reserve, an island shielded by walls, no matter if willingly or not, and thereby obstructs the totalitarian state's entitlement to be omnipresent and omnipotent. In other words, even though the totalitarian state comprehends the individual beings within itself, they stay outside like gaps in a continuum, like white spots on a map that cannot be accessed or reached in any way. Anders calls this "inland-transcendence", a defect in the eyes of the totalitarian state, since it would only achieve perfection if there was no discretion in the nature-philosophical sense - no "self-being", no "privacy", not to mention no "intimacy".
7) The totalitarian force is just interested in pushing through its claims, so individuation is not just a defect, but a scandal, a sin against its monolithic entitlement, and accuses the individual of "self-embezzling" - if such a state would like to articulate its principles, that is. But since the individuation, the sin of the individual, is rooted in its sheer being, the totalitarian state has to consider and fight it as an 'original sin'. However, the totalitarian state can only be successful if both partners, the total power and the 'sinner' take part in this fight simultaneously.
And this means firstly that the total power ought to be indiscreet, and impertinent - to intrude/look into the "discreet" province of the individual, to find whatever was hidden due to the scandal caused by individuation - and today's means to do so are more or less obvious (surveys, controls, intimidation, spying). Secondly, the individual's duty is to give up its discretion, being shameless, to "acknowledge/confess" its a priori inherent "guilt" - to give/deliver its inland-reserve to the totalitarian state. This 'inland expansionism' of the totalitarian state is a process which is identical with the imperialistic expansionism. "Expansionism begins at home" - wherever totalitarianism is beginning, the individual is the first occupied territory.
8) "Integral impertinence" and "integral shamelessness" are the correctives needed by a state striving for totalitarianism to achieve its ideal of perfect integrality. And nothing is more convenient for this than surveillance machines. As we have seen, they are not just typical for totalitarianism, they are also totalitarizing. Wherever surveillance is used with taken-for-grantedness, the key prerequisite for totalitarianism is created, and thus totalitarianism itself.
There's no difference between a state A which uses surveillance ("totalitarian machines") because it is totalitarian, and a state B which becomes totalitarian because it uses such methods (because it thereby accepts that the individual is consumed), the result is the same (Anders uses a French saying to illustrate this: The children of a drunkard don't care whether he's addicted because he is ill or whether he's ill because he is addicted".
[Done, I will write some more stuff in a later post, but these are the main points. Others may feel free to share and improve this, I don't need credit.]
*There is a whole chapter where the author bemoans the phony design of technological products, since it hides the possibly dangerous functions - unlike a hammer, whose shape is kind of honest and obvious in comparison.
For now I will just summarize and translate some of the main thoughts of the chapter about the obsolescence of privacy, which seems to be the most important one at this time:
1) Anders uses reality shows to illustrate how social situations like "visiting" and "encountering" are transformed to processes of consumption, in which one person is the "delivery"/"consumed" and one is the "receiver"/"consumer". We all are the eaters and food of the Others. This is cannibalism.
2) We don't always know that we are about to be "consumed"/"delivered". This part is about wire-tapping. He argues that many people don't take surveillance seriously because they think being recorded doesn't have any effect on their selves: Even if their voices and looks are reproduced, it's supposedly just a phantom-like doppelgaenger. He denies this for the following reasons:
2a) It's wrong that the 'originals' of the items whose reproductions are delivered to us can keep their original form - that they stay those which they "are". Instead, they are already changed by their reproduction, even by their readiness to be reproduced.
The example he uses is a court sitting that wouldn't happen the way it does if it wasn't broadcasted and watched by an audience consisting of millions of people.
2b) "Today's thief steals without stealing, because he is 'only' a thief of images".
It is not true that those who watch/listen to us and record our remarks in some way only experience/have available reproductions of us. Even if they "only" own a reproduction of our voices, this "only" means practically nothing, because thanks to the things we said, they have these things at command, and through these, they have us too. With that being said, we are truly susceptible to blackmail and in control of others, because reproductions of us are in control of others. It is wrong to think that we are unaffected although we are bereaved and deprived. Anders says it is important to repeat this because this enforced indolence is one of the biggest lies of our epoch. Because a thief can now steal images of people and things instead of people and things, he can always claim that it wasn't 'actual' theft to make himself feel comfortable, and this isn't an isolated case but true for all of us. We all like to explore the stores of the world and take with us the things we like, and nobody would think that by reproducing them with a camera, we commit a crime. The business man whose telephone is wire-tapped still has his wallet. The girl which is photographed in an embarrassing pose without her knowledge isn't raped - nothing seems to have happened aside from a few more meters of films and images and audiotapes.
2c) It's not just us, the victims, who are clueless about what is happening and live on without feeling a loss - the same goes for the thieves, since they have their prey, yet no real object in their hands. The grandchildren of the straight bandits of the past create a indistinct situation in which, even if that may sound paradox, the absence is absent. And thanks to that, they keep doing what they do without regret. If they are confronted with their deeds they can always refer to the same alibi: not their own, but that of the victims: For we are still here and didn't experience a loss.
Nothing is more difficult than comprehending the connection between the current state of tech/science and moral*. We haven't learned this yet, and that's why the suggestion that the reproduction processes of our time are responsible for the depravation of our conscience, our sense of guilt, does sound absurd at first. We have to learn this now:
3) All machines that can be used for surveillance are totalitarian.
Nothing is more misleading than "philosophy of science" - the assumption that objects are "morally neutral", that it only matters how they are used - morally or amorally, humanely or inhumanely, democratically or antidemocratically - because it makes it look as if the moral judgement, the articulation of the moral problems, has always to follow, not to precede, the technological progress; a moral philosopher's job is at best reduced to approve an already existing machine and explaining what it should be used for, and for what it shouldn't. This is an illusion.
4) Any apparatus is already defining a kind of usage as soon as it functions, and plays a prejudicating role (politically, socially, morally, economically etc.) because of its specific working performance [Word: for example atomic weapons/military drones are in any case more deathly than, say, normal tanks - I guess that's what he means. He says he wrote more about this in the first part, which I haven't read yet]. The example he gives is once again TV consumption: No matter if you watch cable news, a reality show or a movie - there is no question that TV consumption shapes and distorts people and prejudicates their relationship with the world.
5) Once people are controllable and "deliverable" ("edible", see above), or seen and treated as beings that may be "delivered", and once they live like "edible"/"deliverable" beings, there is no freedom - regardless of the political system, regardless of who exactly is edible/deliverable. Thus it is contradictory to think that freedom can be upheld by using these surveillance methods. Anders compares this to the thought that it would be possible to modernize coal- and oil energy production thanks to nuclear power in order to avoid that nuclear power triumphes over the other two.
6) Why are objects used for surveillance always totalitarian? Because they at least modify, perhaps even extinguish a metaphysical fact that opposes the totalitarian entitlement: Individuation - that man, like every other being, is first and foremost a discretum, something singular and individual - at first, everyone is a reserve, an island shielded by walls, no matter if willingly or not, and thereby obstructs the totalitarian state's entitlement to be omnipresent and omnipotent. In other words, even though the totalitarian state comprehends the individual beings within itself, they stay outside like gaps in a continuum, like white spots on a map that cannot be accessed or reached in any way. Anders calls this "inland-transcendence", a defect in the eyes of the totalitarian state, since it would only achieve perfection if there was no discretion in the nature-philosophical sense - no "self-being", no "privacy", not to mention no "intimacy".
7) The totalitarian force is just interested in pushing through its claims, so individuation is not just a defect, but a scandal, a sin against its monolithic entitlement, and accuses the individual of "self-embezzling" - if such a state would like to articulate its principles, that is. But since the individuation, the sin of the individual, is rooted in its sheer being, the totalitarian state has to consider and fight it as an 'original sin'. However, the totalitarian state can only be successful if both partners, the total power and the 'sinner' take part in this fight simultaneously.
And this means firstly that the total power ought to be indiscreet, and impertinent - to intrude/look into the "discreet" province of the individual, to find whatever was hidden due to the scandal caused by individuation - and today's means to do so are more or less obvious (surveys, controls, intimidation, spying). Secondly, the individual's duty is to give up its discretion, being shameless, to "acknowledge/confess" its a priori inherent "guilt" - to give/deliver its inland-reserve to the totalitarian state. This 'inland expansionism' of the totalitarian state is a process which is identical with the imperialistic expansionism. "Expansionism begins at home" - wherever totalitarianism is beginning, the individual is the first occupied territory.
8) "Integral impertinence" and "integral shamelessness" are the correctives needed by a state striving for totalitarianism to achieve its ideal of perfect integrality. And nothing is more convenient for this than surveillance machines. As we have seen, they are not just typical for totalitarianism, they are also totalitarizing. Wherever surveillance is used with taken-for-grantedness, the key prerequisite for totalitarianism is created, and thus totalitarianism itself.
There's no difference between a state A which uses surveillance ("totalitarian machines") because it is totalitarian, and a state B which becomes totalitarian because it uses such methods (because it thereby accepts that the individual is consumed), the result is the same (Anders uses a French saying to illustrate this: The children of a drunkard don't care whether he's addicted because he is ill or whether he's ill because he is addicted".
[Done, I will write some more stuff in a later post, but these are the main points. Others may feel free to share and improve this, I don't need credit.]
*There is a whole chapter where the author bemoans the phony design of technological products, since it hides the possibly dangerous functions - unlike a hammer, whose shape is kind of honest and obvious in comparison.
Last edited by Word on Sat Jul 12, 2014 11:52 pm, edited 12 times in total.
Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
Ugh. Bookmarked for later. I'll have to read it a second time after it sinks in. I already have several points to add. This is good stuff, thanks Word.
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delinquent
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Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
I, too, struggled to digest this all in one.
Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
Yeah, while translating it I felt a little like these workers who have to put together the deathly joke of the Monty Python sketch.
Re: Fight the NSA? Hide?
I was going to post some deep thoughts until I realized they didn't really add to the discussion. It had something to do with life and the universe being in constant flux and how you can't capture a single slice of a human life and extrapolate real meaning from it, even in aggregate. The simple act of recording information about a subject binds that subject to an instance of time, slowing progress and restricting freedom, blah, blah, blah... I imagine my thoughts are similar to the author's.
However, this summary...
However, this summary...
...reminded me of a thought by Douglas Rushkoff on the edge.org site called "Technologies Have Biases." It is a short read, check it out.Word wrote:3) All machines that can be used for surveillance are totalitarian.
Nothing is more misleading than "philosophy of science" - the assumption that objects are "morally neutral", that it only matters how they are used - morally or amorally, humanely or inhumanely, democratically or antidemocratically - because it makes it look as if the moral judgement, the articulation of the moral problems, has always to follow, not to precede, the technological progress; a moral philosopher's job is at best reduced to approve an already existing machine and explaining what it should be used for, and for what it shouldn't. This is an illusion.