Seriously. These are spy organizations. And here they are - spying. On foreign countries, no less. What were they thinking?

The Snowden leaks started out with things the public actually needed to know. The NSA spying on Americans is a gross overstep of the organization's charter. Spying on friendly nation's leaders is an embarrassment. This, however, seems to me like them doing their job.

At first, I thought that labeling Snowden as a spy was an overreaction. The US government trying to silence a whistle blower. However, were I a juror in a trial in which he released just this document, I'd convict.

Anyone who disagrees is kindly requested to answer two simple questions:
1. What should the NSA do?
2. Assuming this is not this, how can a country maintain military intelligence without doing this?

Shachar

I am very interested in hearing what you believe in. In particular, why do you think the evolutionary model is wrong?

Also, I'd like to know whether you consider your belief of how the species got to be the way they are to be scientific.

Thanks,
Shachar

Care to share what you do believe in, then? Particularly, why you believe the evolutionary model is wrong?

Also, I'm interested to hear whether you think your ideas are scientific, and what that term means to you.

Thanks,
Shachar

When stating that, you forgot to factor in the fact that your way the trip will take much longer.

Shachar

For long term space voyages, all you have to do is accelerate at 9.8m/s^2 for half the voyage, and then turn off the rockets, rotate the ship, and use the same rockets to decellerate at the same rate. Except for the time the ship rotates, the astronautes would feel a normal earth gravity. Bonus, the trip takes less time.

Of course, it's not that simple. Not only are the energy needs of such a trip much higher, there is another potential problem. After about 35 days of accelerating at 9.8m/s^2, your speed will be about a tenth of the speed of light. At those speeds, time flows visibly different inside the ship and on earth. Accelerate much further, and this becomes a one way trip, by definition.

Shachar

Huh?

I did not pour religious !$%!@# into discussion. You did. I just chose a license for my own software, which I have written and decided to share. If you don't like that license, don't use the software. I am not limiting your choice in any way. If you wish to share your software under a non-copyleft free license, feel free to do so with no word of reproach from me.

I do not understand why you defend software released under a proprietary license, which gives the user a very limited set of freedoms, and yet condemn my choices, which give the users a much much greater set of freedoms (though not a great as you'd like, obviously). You seem to think you have a moral right to my code if I choose a free license, but not if I choose to go proprietary.

I simply do not understand this position. It seems hypocritical to me.

You complain about RMS going around telling people what licenses to use. I get that. I think he's pushing it. Then again, you do the exact same thing, only with a different license. Not only this, but RMS's position is, at least, self consistent. He claims that all software should be free. I agree with neither basic claim nor the method he advances that world view, but I understand the world he's aiming for. You, on the other hand, claim that all free software should be non-copyleft, but that proprietary software can be whatever it likes. Maybe I'm missing something, but that does not seem self-consistent to me.

Shachar

You said:

Not a day goes by, and you say:

So, what you're saying is that I should be free to write proprietary software all I want, under whatever restrictions my lawyer can come up with, but should I choose to release the software, that I should not go with a copyleft license.

As my list of projects clearly show, I belong to neither the "Anti-GPL" nor the "GPL-only" camps. As a rule, I try to choose the most restrictive license that does not impose anything on the user of the program (hence - GPL for command line utilities, but LGPL for PgOleDb, which is a driver).

When I have a special interest in people using the software, however, I go with more lenient licenses. BiDiEdit was meant to be a proof of concept reference implementation to a standard, so the higher cause here is the standard, not the actual editor. safewrite represents a relatively modest investment on my part, and a major boon to any program that maintains a configuration file automatically. Since it is a common plague on Linux, my outmost interest here is that people will do safe writes, and my library is a simple convenient way to do it.

The bottom line here is that the licenses on all of those programs represent what I believe is best for my own interests. This is fine and proper, as I am the one who invested the time to write those programs to begin with. You do not gain the moral right to tell me what I should and shouldn't do with programs I write unless you also go around telling Microsoft and Apple what they should with theirs.

Shachar

To be fair, there is some confusion between people like yourself, who advocate the user's freedom to choose whether to use free only software, and the anti-GPL crowd, who advocate a developer's right to choose whether their addition are free or not.

While I am all for the user's freedom to not use free software (and, in fact, the non-free repository is enabled on my machines, and like I said, I do have some proprietary software installed), whenever I choose a license for free software that I write from scratch, I (usually, there are exceptions) choose a copyleft license.

I think the heat from the later argument is warming up the former argument, despite the fact there are few good arguments to limit a user's freedom of choice for the sake of giving her more freedom.

Shachar

You lost me.

I already have the games. They are DRM free. I already have a way to keep track of my library. It's at https://www.humblebundle.com/h.... All it takes is a single password. Why would I want another one, merely for the privilege of having another one?

Most of the games I have (at least, those I'm actually playing) have no multiplayer mode that I'm aware of.

The "single connection" limitation is not much of an issue for me (I do, actually, honor the conditions I bought the games under, which is that they are only for my use), but why would having the DRM to enforce it be an advantage for me?

Shachar

I'll just add that Debian split the non-free stuff into a separate repository, not enabled by default. Not only are you free not to install non-free software, you get an easy way of making sure that non-free doesn't creep in by mistake.

Shachar

No one is talking about shipping DRM as part of Debian (or even in non-free). Valve isn't talking about shipping its games inside Debian. Their games are proprietary, cost money, and contain DRM, and at least the last two make them technically incompatible with the Debian distribution system.

What Valve is offering is for Debian developers to get, free of charge, a Steam subscription to play (almost) all of Valve games. Assuming you are not a Debian developer, you will not see any actual difference in Debian.

Personally, I'm a bit ambivalent on whether to take them up on that offer. All of my proprietary games have come from The Humble Bundle and are DRM free. I do not even have Steam installed, and am not eager to install it. I am, however, curious to see what games are available. Add to that the original commenter's comment, humorous though it was meant to be: I'm not taking a good enough care of my FOSS projects as it is.

Either way, however, this is something for Debian developers to use, not something that affects Debian itself.

Shachar

There's a conundrum at play here.

On the one hand, I know very few people who claim that countries can do without collecting intelligence. This includes both electronic intelligence and actual spies. As far as I'm concerned, the problem is not that the NSA are trying to collect as much information as they can. It is that they are using illegitimate means to do so.

The issue here is not that the NSA is trying to glean as much information about as many people it can. That's what it is meant to do, and anyone saying it shouldn't is welcome to bring forward detailed analysis of how the USA (or any other country) can afford to be without an intelligence organization.

There are two point of real issue here. The first is that it spies on US citizens and residents. The theory goes that I can spy on other countries as far out as I can reach them, because their natural resistance to my spying attempts is limiting my ability to achieve total knowledge which, as you said, is dangerous. The same logic dictates that I do not use the same means against my own citizens and residents, as there are no limiting factors. The NSA's collection of US phone records is the perfect example of why that rule is so important. It is also the reason I think that the NSA getting the UK intelligence to give it UK citizen's phone records is so problematic.

The second issue is that the NSA subverted commercial entities in order to do its spying. This is a violation of the right of ownership. A business has the right to manage its own policies and reputation, and the NSA's ability to force commercial entities to develop features designed to subvert their business plan (see the Lavabit debacle).

I used to head Check Point's product security. One of the accusations commonly heard was to point out that Check Point's founders came from the IDF intelligence corps, and to therefore suspect that Check Point's products had deliberate backdoors. I was in a position where, had that been the case, I'd probably know about it, and I can therefore tell you that, at least during the years 2000-2003, that was not the case. We never deliberately installed a vulnerability, and would do everything we can to make sure there are no vulnerabilities, and fix them when when found.

Sadly, AT&T cannot say the same.

Shachar

I'm wondering how much of what you said you'd still say if you looked up (e.g. - on some of my other posts in this thread) which country I actually live in.

Shachar

I am an Israeli citizen and resident. As such, I do not have 4th amendment protection. There are similar principles in the Israeli law (yes, there are, really), but they protect me from unauthorized searches done by my country, not be searches done by the US.

If the NSA is spying on me (or, in this particular case, on my prime minister and minister of defense), then they might be breaking Israeli law, but they are not breaking American law.

If, on the other hand, the US got my government to spy on me and transfer the data to the US (AFAK did not happen with Israel, but did with the UK and several others), then, yes, I think I deserve to know about it. Even if it's legal for the NSA to do so, it is not legal for the IDF/Mossad/whatever to do it.

Yet again, if the NSA cooperated with the Israeli intelligence to collect intel on what's happening in, e.g., Syria, then that is not a violation of law in either countries. It is not over stepping their boundaries. That is precisely why these agencies were set up to do to begin with. Any details released on those operations, particularly if the release compromises these operations, is a violation of Snowden's security clearance.

The areas that are borderline are areas where the NSA acts within its charter, but against "adversaries" that should not be adversarial. I am referring, among other things, to the NSA's tapping of phones and email for e.g. Israel and Germany's prime minister/counselor. While technically within the organization's charter, at best it is extremely hypocritical to do so.

Shachar

The NSA's operations abroad are not against the organization charter, and are, therefor, not against the law.

Some of the revelations, however, while detailing operations that are technically legal, do paint the organzation in a light that shows it to be an unchecked body with too much power and not enough supervision.

The specific examples listed in the article may not be under the above category. Still, it is not clear who did the sifting through and filtering the material to decide what gets published. If Snowden did none of it, than those can be chalcked down to "collateral damage". If the bulk of the material is relevant for a whistle blower, I'd still go with clemancy.

Shachar
P.s.
Not that I, as a non-US citizen, or even resident, have a real say on the matter.