This is a rather extreme sentiment, but it has a point.. Democracy is an experiment, one that is easily broken. People and governments are fickle creatures. Seasons change, and one might find themselves under unwanted scrutiny. A lot of lives were destroyed because of their political affiliations (Frank Oppenheimer lost his physics professorship, etc) Nixon has his enemies list, and now we find out that the IRS specifically targeted Tea party organizations. I can understand the want and need for information, but it can too easily be abused. Perhaps now so much in our current environment, but it can set a bad future precedent.

This blogger does not get it. Big time.

Jailbreaking did not come about for bypassing security or stealing iPhones. It came about because Apple wouldn't sell their GSM-capable phones on vendors other than AT&T, which meant that they also could not be used outside the US, which is the only place the things were being sold. So some Russian hackers came up with a jailbreak, but it wasn't so they could run arbitrary applications, it was so they could run a single application to rewrite the SIM vendor check, disable the carrier lock, and use the damn things on GSM carriers other than AT&T. T-Mobile in the US is one such carrier, and AT&T had demanded, and got, the carrier lock in exchange for letting Apple demand infrastructure changes to AT&T's network for things like "Visual Voice Mail".

The vast majority of these iPhones were legally sold for the full price in the US; Apple put a limit on the number of iPhones you could buy, in order to thwart this thriving export business, because technically, the carrier networks are fairly fragile things, and the phones had not been certified to the carrier networks on which they were being used, or by the regional equivalent of the FCC -- hence they were called "gray market" iPhones in these countries.

The benefit to Apple turned out to be immense, since with tools available for writing *an app* for the unlocking, it was relatively easy to classdump the objC files, and use the other APIs -- and apps were born. Steve actually didn't *want* Apps on the iPhone: he was deathly afraid of building another Newton, and the Apps he gave you were the ones he thought you needed, and no more. He didn't even want there to be ringtones that he and Jon Ivy hadn't approved (a pain in the ass when there are a small number of ringtones, 11,000 employees, and about half of them ate lunch in Cafe Macs in a two hour window).

For six months, many engineers inside Apple, including myself, were jailbreaking our own phones, and using the hacker tools because there *was no* formal API or dev kit. I personally wrote an X Code plugin for making iPhone Apps using the hacker tools, and we passed it around internally at Apple.

A startup was going to make a business of selling an SDK for the iPhone -- Apple _bought them_, and *that's* where Apple got their formal SDK, which they then went through and cleaned up APIs, and partitioned the data you could access from one app to another.

Everything that people jailbreak the things for these days is to get around data partitioning or carrier usage restrictions, i.e. things like using the phone as a WiFi hotspot for a laptop, without paying additional fees or metered rates to the carriers for the greater laptop bandwidth usage capability, or to be able to do the carrier unlock to get around per-region carrier lock-in contracts that Apple had signed.

The bottom line is that Apple could have avoided almost of of the hacking that happened fairly early on by not putting the carrier lock in the baseband firmware, which was a dumbass design decision based on the Samsung baseband chip having the feature implemented already, and having it up in user space in the commcenter program instead.

And their device would be a lot less interesting, and Android might have followed that lead, and been a lot less interesting as well. And Apple wouldn't have made tons of money on Apps because there would be no AppStore.

But as long as there are carrier locks, and more or less absurd carrier restrictions on bandwidth for phones s. hotspots (yes, Sprint, I'm talking to you), there will be jailbreaking. This is a DRM issue, and if jailbreaking is the only way to bypass DRM, then jailbreaking will happen.

Bottom line philosophy lesson: There will always be people who say "These devices are made of atoms. I paid for these atoms. I own them. They will God Damn Well Do What I Tell Them To Do".

They could, but then no one would buy the stuff they want to replace it with. This is likely a way for them to remonetize the existing VMS customer base, who isn't upgrading at this point because It Just Works(tm), and who isn't buying new hardware because It's Sufficient(tm).

This is the same problem Microsoft Windows XP are posing for Microsoft.

Me too!

Especially when they are peeing in a public restroom, and they get footage of themselves, and anyone else that happens to be there. I expect they will work in mirrors when the officer is washing their hands.

And with no way to turn it for lunch breaks, we can see when they take too long, or are technically off duty and make comments to other cops who are technically off duty.

The FISA court is staffed by judges that rotate through from other courts. If the FISA court isn't a court, than which one is?

A court might feature such things as having more than one party represented before it, and might more than occasionally rule against the government.

The FISA court is a court like Reality TV is reality. A warrant signed by Judge R. Stamp is as good as no warrant at all.

There's zero risk of a betrayal exposing the information if you don't gather it at all in the first place. Information that doesn't exist doesn't fall into the wrong hands. International lines, fine. Within your own countries borders on your own citizens, not so fine.

I have to point out this little tidbit:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/06/09/911-whistleblower-snowden-defected-china-whatever-he-knows-they-likel

The point I am trying to get across with this is that the teams doing this type of surveillance are made up of individuals, and as such, if you collect this information about your own citizens, you risk that information falling into unfriendly hands.

Consider that if Edward Snowden took even just traffic analysis information with him to China, which would be easy to fit on a several DVDs, this information could be used for economic and industrial espionage purposes. It would be very easy to see which companies were talking to which other companies, and impute information about the deals going down between various actors.

This information could be used to great economic advantage. Who wouldn't want to know the next company with publically traded stock that Google, Apple, or Facebook is in acquisition talks.

That the information was collected at all in the first place is a loaded gun, and one disgruntled ex-employee or contractor is all it take to pull the trigger on that gun, and in many cases they would have to go to extremes of hiding behind China to do it.

I have to stop you right there. ECHELON has been gathering SIGINT for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States since the 1960's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON so the SIGINT existed. Add to that Kenneth Williams July 2001 "Phoenix Memo", which was buried by the FBI until Coleen Rowley took advantage of a whistle-blowing law to bring it to light: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Memo

There was also a Chinese wall between intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the DIA, which was de jure in one direction, but de facto in both directions due to interagency pissing contests about the information flow only going one way, with no tit-for-tat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger#The_wall

Because they were so incredibly effective at preventing 9/11 in the US, and so effective at stopping the London, UK subway bombings, and so effective at preventing the train bombing in Madrid, Spain, right? I'm feeling less imperiled already.

Perhaps if instead of complaining about information disclosures, they disclosed the plots they had been able to foil, and had rather public trials, we'd trust them more, but at this point, they act more like a police agency. Police agencies catch bad guys after the fact, after you are already dead from being blown up or shot or stabbed or raped. You know, after the crime.

I'd prefer not to live in a police state: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state since their track record at preventing criminal activity from occurring in the first place is generally piss-poor.

There were Credit Card Skimmers installed in the checkout lines in 21 Bay Area Lucky Stores, followed by rampant buying sprees on the card of the people stupid enough to use the self-checkout lines, which are not very well policed. I definitely won't use the things.

http://millbrae.patch.com/groups/editors-picks/p/credit-card-skimming-reported-in-21-bay-area-lucky-stores

Frankly there are, and have been for years, UPC code databases, but you have to license them, unless you are willing to go for the vastly more incomplete consumer assembled EAN/UCC-13 code sites. My first experience with a licensed UPC database was in 1995, but I was aware of NCR systems where you could get them in 1985 or so. They used to come on QIC-20 tapes for loading into the NCR Tower XP and Tower 32 systems that they used to use to run all the cash registers in the supermarket. Now you can get them on DVD.

There are also food ingredient databases, but they tend to be more sketchy, particularly for store brands, which generally come off the assembly line that's currently cheapest. There is also a push for cost reduction on store brands, so they will tend to initially go with a higher end supplier when they bring out a new store brand something, and several moths after it's out, you'll read the label and find they've substituted corn syrup for the cane sugar and similar cost reduction tricks.

It's a real bitch if you have, for example, a corn allergy, or Crohn's disease, and they've bait-and switched things on you. You also have to watch the fried foods, such as prepackaged dinners, when they decide to use peanut oil instead of some other more expensive oil, because it was cheapest on the commodity food oil market for the plant that week.

They don't data mine this stuff from your frequency marketing card because there would be some legal liability both from a HIPPA information standpoint, and if they changed a formulation, and hadn't updated their database recently enough to flag an allergen at the checkout.

We'll just implant an RFID chip. 665 was just implanted, and you're in luck! No waiting in this line!

"On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead."

Technically, this policy was push by the environmental lobby:

"Environmental groups saw the breeder as a danger. An unlimited source of energy, they feared, would mean more energy use and waste, leading to more global environmental degradation and also opening new risks for proliferation of nuclear weapons."

See the whole story here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/rossin.html