Actually, because you have no real way to figure out if they're specifically speeding anyway, it's more like warning *everyone* there's a neighborhood watch in a certain place.

...which, uh, happens at all the time with signs, and appears to be legal.

What harm to people? Well: generally ensuring someone with a useful organ dies far before their time (gives best quality organs) and have that organ harvested. If there's money in it someone will do it.

How will people abuse organ trade?

First off, you can go and kill people who aren't in a good position to defend themselves and who won't be missed and harvest their organs. Who? Take e.g. runaway children or orphans, illegal immigrants, homeless people, generally anyone without a social network, and (as previous posts mentioned) people in Mexico, Latin America, and certain countries in South America who antagonise someone who can arrange a murder.

Secondly, offer poor but otherwise healthy people who desperately need money for their children or spouse the following deal: we'll buy your organ (for a reasonable amount), we'll give your family the money, but you agree to be put to sleep so that we can harvest your organ. Illegal in the US, but who cares? You can always take a (voluntary) trip to Mexico or to Columbia to fulfill your end of the bargain.

And how would you like for e.g. the FARC (Google Columbia) to collect its "revolutionary taxes" by kidnapping "enemies of the people" and cutting out their organs? The market doesn't care where the product came from, right?

Besides which the whole idea is totally redundant.

Simply make organ donorship the legal default and you'll have lots of donor organs. And legislate that only people who themselves have signed a legally binding agreement to be a donor after they die (regardless of their families' wishes) qualify for donor organs.

This whole idea is "free market" taken outside the area where it's beneficial.

The ones affected are the companies that actually own power plants to generate power and sell it to the utility companies, as they are the ones who see their earnings fluctuate between $0.50/MWh to $60/MWh.

And guess what? These market conditions make it hard to impossible to make a profit out of modern clean gas-fired power plants. I know of at least one example (The Netherlands) where an ultra-modern gas-fired plant had to be closed down and dismantled because it couldn't compete. It was a plant that could both supply a base load and respond quickly to variations. It could compete very well as a peak-load plant ... but not as a base load supplier. Unfortunately the market for peak loads had shrunk to the extent that it could no longer be operated at a profit.

The plants best suited to survive in this market are old, dirty, written-off coal plants (base load) and old dirty written-off peakers. Oh irony ... abundant (but quite volatile) green power kills off the cleanest and most modern fossil fuel plants first. I bet the Greens don't like that.

This stuff goes far, quite far, and to quote Jacob Applebaum: "I can't remember voting on any of this stuff, or even having seen a public debate on it".

How about you?

It all depends on what society at large thinks is a worthwhile price to pay. Take file sharing (of copyrighted files) for example. It's perfectly possible to stamp it out: just legislate to allow the MPAA and RIA to demand all ISP's to install monitoring software and match whatever you upload to a database of signatures of copyrighted works. The Snowdon papers show that it's very likely that the infrastructure is available to do just that.

Encryption is of course to be outlawed for use by private citizens. US-style "damages" will pay for the enforcement effort and file sharing will be killed in short order.

Of course there are such pesky things like the first amendment that would get in the way, but those are only *legal* and *political* obstacles, not technological ones. Which means they can be removed whenever people feel like it. And people's perception of what is or isn't acceptable can be changed by abuses of technology.

For example, it's perfectly possible to legislate that whoever uploads your mug without your consent is liable for damages (freeing the ones pictured from having to prove any actual damages) and legislate that all and any ISPs and hosting companies must give their full cooperation and assist anyone who can show that their picture has been uploaded without their consent to identify the perpetrator. That would also necessitate the end of anonymous internet access.

What you really mean is that you don't wish for this to happen, not that it can't happen for technological (or political) reasons.

If you thought that no amount of political pressure can effectively take away your rights to upload pictures of people, just wait until the first pedophile ring is discovered scouting schools for attractive "candidates" using Google Glasses and putting the lot online for perusal.

Unfortunately people have a way of abusing new technology in ways that lead to hitherto unheard of legal constraints.

The thing with Science is that you amend established theory in the light of new evidence or improved analysis of existing evidence. And that's what we see here.

Of course you never bothered to glance at the article before grabbing your keyboard, but if you had, you would have seen that this study tries to see which hypothesis about what factor was the main driver of climate the best fits the reconstructed temperatures over the past 100 years (based on observations).

The reason why we conduct studies like these isn't to identify the drivers of climate in the past hundred million years. It's to identify the main drivers now and in recent times, such as the past 100 years.

The question of what the driver of climate has been in the past 100 years is one open to investigation and debate. To be blunt: that case wasn't closed after you finished your geophysics course.

Counter to your claim, this study finds that assuming insolation was the main driver of climate over the past 100 years is not consistent with reconstructed temperatures.

I think you do a genuine disservice to any informed debate on what the cause of the (observed) global warming by donning a mantle of quasi-authority and (a) confusing the question of climate drivers on a geological timescale with those happening now and (b) dismissing a study you never even bothered read.

They took every precaution to prevent the world from learning about this sort of thing. If they'd had their way, nobody would know or suspect and everything would be fine.

If you want to blame anyone for having all this come out, blame that tattletale contractor guy with the big usb sticks.

Yeah. I always found it funny that the conspiracy theory brought in the British news media. I mean, it's absurd to give anyone a script, but the British news media?

<sarcasm>Because if there's any group that would just fall in line with the Bush administration murdering thousands of people, it's the British news media.</sarcasm>

I remember when the assertion that one of the terrorists was actually still alive showed up...and my response was 'So you assert the US government, instead of just making up Iraqi terrorists to pin this on to invent a war, used pre-existing Saudi terrorists that they could not confirm were already dead?'

And the less said about the 'using missiles instead of planes' theory the better. Man, was that one silly or what?

There are two kinds of conspiracy theories out there. One that postulates plausible causes for actual events. I mean, Jack Ruby _did_ have mob ties, and the Kennedy administration was cracking down on the mob, so if you want to assert that Oswald did a mob hit of JFK, and then was taken out, hey, I don't quite believe you, but you're not _insane_. That is indeed plausible.

The other kind of conspiracy theory is where you take some event and randomly find 'inconsistencies', which are usually just things said in confusion that are untrue, or misunderstandings of what is going on, or things that are completely normal but don't look normal to people who don't understand disaster, and try to build a massive conspiracy using every single one of them. None of which will hold up to the single question of 'Why the hell would anyone running that conspiracy actually do that?'

Which, in the context of the Kennedy assassination, is basically trying to make there be more other active shooters beside Oswald, elaborate conspiracy theories about misunderstanding of physics and bullets instead of just saying 'Yes, Oswald shot him...but _why_?', which is a much better question.

I'm suspecting it's doublespeak. He used other people's credentials...in the sense that they didn't even bother giving each individual person their own login. I'm sure he wasn't technically 'supposed' to have access to some of that information, but that probably means he just copied it directly from some accessible file share instead of using their crappy web UI.

The intelligence infrastructure is a joke. It is a giant uncontrolled operation flailing around randomly sucking up all the data it can, with no controls on anything internally.

And Snowden did a huge service for this country. Not in the information he stole, not in the operations he revealed. That as nice to know, and to all those asshats who assert that intelligence operations need to be kept secret...sure, individual operations should be secret, yes. Not what type of operations and spying exist.

But, anyway, the truely great service is that Snowden demonstrated that literally every intelligence agency in the world already has that information. Trust me, they are, at least, communally, as smart as Snowden, and as it is apparently fucking easy to just be invited to b given access to everything, everyone else already has it.

In fact, considering how shitty the controls apparently are, it makes much more sense for other intelligence agencies to spend their time and effort subverting subdivisions of contractors of our intelligence services than trying to run their own network, letting them use our intelligence resources in real time. Without Snowden, the public at large would have no idea this was happening.

The question is not 'Do you trust our government with all your private information', or even 'Morally, think about how would you feel if you knew the Chinese were doing the esame thing to you, and you'll understand how this makes other countries feel.'...it's 'How do you like the fact that the Chinese are spying on you, right now, using your own tax money and your own government agencies.'

Because they are. Or, at least, could be if they thought you were the least bit interesting. (Incidentally, 'interesting' to intelligence services is not as high a threshold as people think. Do you, for example, work in the technology field and could conceivably be a useful asset to get malware somewhere they want it? Or have access to proprietary business secrets? Or medical information?)

(1) the NSA must be able to detect, identify, and trace people who are involved in threats to state security or criminal acts on basis of their communications

(2) one of the main (and indispensible) tools in such work is social network analysis, i.e. who talks to whom and how often. If people communicate a lot, or if they communicate little but highly significantly then they form a social network and are probably working together

(3a) you don't have the ability to detect and identify social networks on basis of communication unless you have the ability to collect metadata from anyone (i.e. you install technical means to tap everything)

(3b) it's impossible to reliably detect and identify social networks on basis of communication alone without actually using those taps to collect all metadata from everyone.

(4) therefore having reliable detection capabilities and not hoovering everyone's metadata are mutually exclusive.

(5) So unless you allow the NSA unrestricted collection of metadata (including that of all Americans), you prevent the NSA from doing its job

You can agree or disagree with him here (and you're invited to do so) but you either refute this line of reasoning or you accept that you are preventing the NSA from doing its job.

And unless you can refute this reasoning, you end up deciding whether or not to give up certain liberties (i.e. online privacy) in order to gain security. The point being that you will run an additional risk unless you give up those liberties.

Now that's a decision the voters can and should make I think. After all, they're the real stakeholders, not the organizations.

You obviously know more about the situation in Australia than I do, and disabling the freedom of the press will definitely encourage corruption.

From the article however it appears that Australian civil servants regularly misappropriate technical information that comes to them under certain state-security statutes and then turn around and hand it to commercial parties of their choice to develop into products.

I honestly don't understand how these people can sleep at night. As a civil servant you're supposed to serve the people that employ you, not steal their work under cover of security statutes. And as for those "scientists" plagiarising (i.e. putting their own name on) ideas and inventions handed to them by state security ... words fail me.

Plus that gem about that new Aussie law (the Defence Trade Controls Act) that seems so broad that it can criminalise you for innocuous acts like sending an email with an explanation or leaving a server open (think about OSS) with e.g. software or information on potential dual use technology. (See e.g. http://www.uws.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/470072/Defence_Controls_Act_-_Information_v2.pdf and fos a list of controlled goods: http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/F2012L02318/be04cd99-b7aa-4f39-a4cb-e35196ffc653)

In all probability the Australian government just wanted to impress the US with its zeal and preparedness to go after proliferators. In doing that they seem to have created a law (the DTCA) that allows communication about just about anything that could possibly find dual use to be retrospectively criminalised.

The only way to stay clear seems to be to either have a legal department vet each and every communication outside Australia (including accessible servers). Otherwise you put your head on the chopping block and all you can do is hope nobody will (with hindsight !) find cause to bring down the axe.

This is a school of legislation that goes back to the best traditions of the Crown asserting its Sovereign Rights over its subjects. Just put in a catch-all article and see if you're going to invoke it afterwards. Result: ease of legislation for the Government and everybody else has to live in fear of being prosecuted and can only hope for leniency and good will on part of the Government.

Now the US has got many things wrong, but this isn't one of them.

Only it now manifests as a lack of ethics in legislation.

Erm, okay, you're talking about something completely different...

...but still not making much sense to me.

The problem is that 'If you instead had a wire to the machine in the room, you could monitor the transactions over the wire. You could ensure a non turing complete language is used in the wire protocol. You can deny humans access. You can apply defense in depth to a wire. No so much to a room full of humans.' you can do _on an air-gapped machine_.

What you have just proposed doing is to put the UI of the secure machine outside the secure machine, and locking down interactions between it and the secure machine...which is fine, but there's no reason you can't put that UI _inside the air gap_. And in fact that makes much more sense.

You, uh, just need two of them in the room. One that people can physically access, and one, locked behind bars, that they cannot, connected via a wire, with an air-gap between that system and the outside world.

This is a bit of an overkill, though. If you are worried about the people who access the air-gapped computer being a weak link, in actuality you _build the UI with security_ (Just like your hypothetical wire protocol, but much easier.) and then don't let them physically access the CPU or disks. (I recommend a external CD-RW drive.)

And you 'analyze' what they do by simply recording the screen and keyboard. Which you can do by either unidirectional wiring or by literally recording it with a camera. Or having watchers.

Or, alternately, if you want, you can do it like I said and just put a UI computer in the air-gap room also. You can even render the UI computer fairly difficult to hijack by building it solely out of read-only storage. It would be the perfect place for some sort of dumb terminal that is just running a web browser connected to the actual secure machine, which is locked up inside a box inside the air-gap and none of the users can get to it.

Now I'm imagining someone trying transmit a Skype conversation over the air-gap via audio. Or just the audio, at least.

It seems extremely silly, but then I started thinking about a hypothetical audio bug that literally just relayed the audio _as_ encoded audio...but in a way that was easier to hear through walls and windows and stuff. Like pumping it at higher volume, but at frequencies we couldn't hear. Or doing it much slower (Presumably with some sort of voice activation so it would only record 8 hours of audio a day, or whatever, and could take 24 to play it back.) which would allow more error correction.

Everyone always talks about the high-than-human audio frequencies, but I wonder...if you encode it tight enough, and can transmit audio 24/7 and it's not recording that much, could you possibly transmit it on _lower_ frequencies?

Of course, no one actually knows if this is workable but the CIA.

But transmitting data is easy if you can get someone inside where the data is. For example, I once had a weird idea for an bug that pretended to be CFL bulb, but it would slightly modulate the light frequency in response to audio. I think intelligence services have actually done that sort of thing before, but it was amplitude modulation whereas I'm talking about frequency modulation.