We've been slowly moving in that direction for quite some time now. Often, when some of those small, individual steps have been noticed and discussed, the discussion tends to (understandably) focus on the declne itself and the problems it brings.

Unfortunately, this almost always ignores another slowly-amplifying aspect of the problem: the gradual conditioning (Pavlov-style) of the people responsible. Each time we - The People - allow abuse of power to go unpunished or a another roadblock placed in the way of our Rights, the politician responsible is trained to do it again. We are very slowly traiing our politicians to believe that nobody will actually stop them. Even worse, we reward some of it, such as when we give paid vacations instead of years-in-prison whenever the police beat somebody up.

So now we have a problem on our hands: we've taught some people that they are above the law. We've taught that the risk of being caught is so close to zero that such concepts don't apply to them. When you have people that no longer fear reprecussions, there is no incentive for them to change. An argument could be made that it would even be a rational decision, given how reliable the historical record has been.

I strongly suspect that we won't see real change until this feedback-loop has been disrupted. Once the usual human level of fear has been re-established, we could see improvments quite quickly, but it has to be real - they have to truly fear that they could be held accountable for their own actions, in some way.

Hypothetically, there are a number of ways such a fear could be created. Traditionally, things like "being voted out of office" and "jail" have been used to decent effect. While I really wish such things were still realistic goals, I fear we have left those opportunities behind in the distant past.

Unfortunately, I fear there only one thing left that can break through the years of conditioning: the sight of one of their peers losing their head to the Guillotine[1] the angry mob constructed for the occasion. It might only take one - fear of that magnitude can shift attitudes amazinly fast. As a pacifist, though, I loath the idea[2] of such a tool could be necessary. There's still time for the players involved to choose one of the better alternatives.

As time goes on, the probability of some person(s) snapping and deciding to "fix" this mess French Revolution style is sounding far more realistic than a bunch of politicians suddenly ignoring years of conditioning and flipping sides, all on their own...

[1] : or the modern substitute
[2]: ...and really really really hope I am wrong about this

ack; in my hates, didn't notice the other author mentioned on wiki. That poem is atributed to Rudyard Kipling, not Shakespeare, though they both speak similarly on the subject.

I think you're probably strongly underestimating just how bad the *accusation* of such a charge can be,; especially with how easy it is to plant any sort of incrimnating file. Really, though, America's panic over that entire topic is a topic for another thread.

the story is now that you've payed someone to keep quiet

Of course, THAT obviously-wrong solution to being blackmailed has been know for a long time. As Shakespeare put it:

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"

It may have bad consequences, and it may nto even work, but irunning fighting the blackmailer is still a much, much better option than giving in to what they want, which only invites more of the same.

Why are you all pre-supposing that the threat has to be about something you actually did? If $ENEMY calls you with threats to reveal that secret child-pornography studio you have hidden away in your house, it doesn't matter if it isn't actually true - they can still ruin your life with just the accusation. Really, blackmail doesn't rely on you on something you did that you try to hide, but instead preys upon people who have something to lose, such as your family or job.

A traditional way isn't even to go after *YOU*. They just see to it that your parents -or kids start losing their jobs or are subject toother threats. To quote from a particularly well-written reddit post (which everybody should read!)

With this tech in place, the government doesn't have to put you in jail. .... they can email you a note saying that they can prove your dad is cheating on his taxes. Or they can threaten to get your dad fired. All you have to do is... report back every week [and rat out your friends], or you dad might lose his job. So you do. You turn in your friends and even though they try to keep meetings off grid, you're reporting on them to protect your dad.

[...]

Everyone walking around is scared. They can't talk to anyone else because they don't know who is reporting for the government. Hell, at one time YOU were reporting for the government. Maybe they just want their kid to get through school. Maybe they want to keep their job. Maybe they're sick and want to be able to visit the doctor. It's always a simple reason. Good people always do bad things for simple reasons.

The copyright infringement problem you describe is only the beginning. The long-term flaw in this plan, I suspect, is that they are claiming to be able to detect a class of "illegal"/"bad" data.

In the early days of the net, this kind of detection was a major part of the pornography debate in addition to the usual copyright stuff. A major defense (one I suspect lead to the creation of the "safe harbor" provisions in the DMCA) was that it is patently unreasonable to force an ISP to decide the legality of each bit that moves across their network. Comparisons were made to the Common Carriers, etc. The consensus seems to be more or less that "safe harbor" idea - that it was only reasonable to request the ISP act after the fact, instead of trying to make them invent some sort of magic "evil bit" detector.

If an ISP wants to ignore all that, though, and volunteer that they have such detection capability... they might be asking for a long line of lawsuits for each item they *failed* to warn about. Even better: it's all the excuse the anti-porn (or anti-whatever) busybodies need to impose their ideas of a "child safe" internet. After all, if you can detect something complicated like copyright infringement, detecting pornography must be trivial.

TL;DR - their lawyer must be having a seizure over the potential liability exposure they seem to be asking for

"The Media" is overwhelmingly dominated by corporations, and it is not just Americas problem. Those corporations are overwhelmingly interconnected with the interests of a vast array of other unrelated businesses, be it just advertising revenue or outright arms of the same corporation. The mass corporate media is using FUD/muddying the waters/dumbing down just enough to make the majority of voters for political reasons, they are doing so because it is good business for other arms of their corporation and their partners.
[...snip...]

TL;DR version: "The Media is just a few more Lords. It's what we get for letting our government degrade back into feudalism."

Really? I guess my ISP doesn't count as "major"? They may not be the biggest player, but they've not exactly "small" either. Frankly I respect their business decision of going with the "slow and steady"growth rate instead of the "quickly oversubscribe as many people as possible" that most other ISPs seem to be going with. More importantly, they have a specific policy of treating all data equally:

At Sonic.net, we believe that customers buy our service with the understanding that we will simply deliver their traffic without inspection, modification or artificial limitations.

In summary: We don't touch yer bits! (We believe that would be inappropriate.)
Just because you have an anti-competitive and restricting contract with your ISP doesn't mean everybody does.

You should be careful not to project your own bad decisions onto others - some of us do research first, and choose the businesses we want associate with on more than just price.

"We paid for the internet one dialup account at a time."

Not really, though dialup paid for a bit of it. Much of the cash came from the federal government, in the form the grants that made ARPA/DARPA, and later the subsidies to AT&T/etc to build out fiber-optic to the entire country... which we're still waiting for... over a decade later.

Exactly!

Now, the big questions is: do you or anybody else truly believe that the NSA's (or anybody else's) search tools and data mining heuristics can magically avoid making that exact same mistake?

Too much data-capture just adds noise. Any database of sufficient size is going to be full of this kind of incorrect association. In the end, with the vast amounts of data available, you can probably find "data" that "supports" any conclusion you want.

This is the danger of sweeping data collection: not that they care about any traditional concern, but that decisions are being made because of sombody saw animals^Wterrorists in the clouds^Wemail and cell-phone metadata.

I normally don't resort to what is basically name-calling, but given how the 4th Amendment patently requires a number of criteria they are stating they will no longer bother with, that would normally make them criminals. However, with this statement, they've removed much of the ambiguity surrounding the searching issue, and added a significant amount of intent on their part. So instead of "merely" having criminals in high places at the DoJ, we have traitorous and un-American criminals instead.

This isn't, unfortunately, a conflict of law at the core, but instead a conflict of basic ideology and philosophy. If you believe in the constitution and the ideas about "freedom" and "equality" that it was built to maintain, you wouldn't try to argue your way around the spirit of the law. Everybody involve here knows damn well that the founders tried to stress the importance of limiting government's power and reach. So what do you call someone who willfully makes a point of acting against those very core ideas and protections? Someone who promises to continue violating the highest law of the land, in their own words?

  Simple: "un-American traitors".

*sigh*

I guess I will keep trying to teach people gpg/otr/etc. One positive thing to come of this is that there have been more people receptive to learning some basic crypto the last month or so, than in the last ~12 years. "Better late than never?"

http://www.hungry.com/~jamie/hacktest.text

0133 Ever fix a hardware problem in software?
0134 ... Vice versa?

...

0141 Ever physically destroy equipment from software?