The analogy can be made to work however...

Imagine a pamphlet, printed in a country that's not Finland, that includes, like many do, a back cover soliciting for donations for some worthy cause. I mention to my Finnish friend an article I happened to read in aforementioned pamphlet, and they say to me "That sounds fascinating, I'd be very interested in reading that article. Can you send it to me?*". So I pop the pamphlet in an envelope, and post it to them. So now a Fin, in Finland, is in possession of something soliciting funds, from an organisation that has not applied for permission to solicit funds within Finland. Uh oh!

Are you suggesting that the organisation that wrote the pamphlet should be held liable for any fines levied by the Finnish courts? Perhaps instead the person who mailed the pamphlet should be held liable, even though they have nothing to do with the organisation doing the soliciting? If neither of these is the case, in what way is this situation different to what is being discussed?

*If it helps you might like to think of this request as akin to the http get request to load the web page in your browser.

You say this like it's a bad thing. I can't help but think that actual person specific data is a better reason to stop an individual, and subject them to a more detailed scrutiny, than the police basing their decision on race, clothing worn, policeman's intuition, or whatever reason takes their fancy at the time. Once we have granted the police the right to stop and search, giving them the ability to focus on those more likely to be breaking the law is a good thing, surely?

I have to say, public records are public records. If the public were not meant to be able to access this data it wouldn't be public. While I'm sure there will be individuals, some of whom won't even be on those lists you mentioned or ashamed of what the web remembers of them, who will object to this instant access on principle I'm struggling to see exactly what that principle is.

I tend to agree. I would hope, however, that any video they do record is both timestamped and watermarked in some way, so as to provide some level of trust in the veracity of any footage.

And this I emphatically agree with. The occasions when certain police officers have forbidden members of the public from filming them, and even removed cameras from them, is just wrong. There is no justification, and any excuse is generally couched in terms of an appeal to authority. That authority does not exist.

What profit do they get for giving millions to these?

National Audubon Society - people appreciate birds more, so they'll buy birdseed at Walmart.

Harvard University. Threefold: 1) Harvard alumni tend to be wealthy. They'll have more money to spend at Walmart and Sams Club. 2) They often start businesses. Businesses buy stuff at Walmart and supply stuff to Walmart. 3) They may employee some people. Those people may have kids who can stock shelves at Walmart.

Georgetown University: They're trying to buy good will with future politicians early, so when they lobby for exploitative laws later, they'll be sure to get them. Plus what goes for Harvard.

Nature Conservancy: purely to dupe people into thinking Walmart does good things, so they'll buy more stuff.

Any more? I can play anti-capitalist conspiracy-whacko all day.

Oh, for good measure: unskilled entry level jobs should pay what's needed to support a family so high school kids can't ever get a job!

It only seems that way because when (several orders of magnitude more) money laundering happens on a regular basis involving any of the national currencies, it doesn't generally make the news, whereas anything involving bitcoins is apparently newsworthy—including some rather careless individuals getting arrested for knowingly participating in a crime which had very little to do with cryptocurrencies. (In this case the buyers reportedly said that they wanted the bitcoins for the purpose of buying stolen credit cards, and the sellers chose to go through with the transaction anyway.)

Face it, money laundering isn't very interesting on its own. It mostly comes down to failure to file the right paperwork. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is something new and different, so it's no surprise that the news covers Bitcoin-related money laundering and not USD-related money laundering, even though the latter is far more commonplace.

Try technocrat.net - Bruce Perens already closed it down twice due to low interest, but if /. really bites it this time it might stay up...

Is this the Technocrat site you're referring to? If so, that is just as horribly laid out and offensive to my eyes as the beta site is. There's enough white space on each side for 2 more columns each. Besides that though, what the hell is with everyone going to column layouts anyway? The row layout of slashdot is far superior especially on mobile devices. If that is the supposed new hangout for us, I'll see y'all elsewhere.

That's basically the purpose of our entire structure of government, to prevent any one part of it from assuming too much power and doing too much damage. Our government is based on the fundamental distrust of people in power and government in general. And the result has been the most prosperous and free nation in the history of the world. I'm mystified as to why people nowadays want to go the opposite direction, why they suddenly believe government knows best--government that is run by people as messed up as everyone else on the planet.

When did the EPA start regulating personal beliefs about the origin of the universe? or school curriculums?

Your hypocrisy is astounding.

How many things that you know have you personally observed or heard first-hand?

You're forgetting grade school science. The experiment, study, or calculations should be reproducible one person does should be able to be done by other scientists. If someone working for Chicago Solar claims that tree rings indicate that ... and therefore San Francisco will be underwater by the year 2000, other scientists should be able to look at those same tree ring photos, do the same calculations, and end up with the same result.

If a student at TTI runs an analysis of the dihydrogen monoxide levels published by the national weather service, any scientist running the same calculations on the same data should get the same result. THAT'S reproducibility, it's a basic foundation of science and it was on the test in about 4th grade.

If the data is kept secret and the calculations are kept secret, that's not reproducible. That's not science, that's mysticism - tea reading.

Why don't you go read it and find out?

Or you could keep ranting and praising our glorious EPA who would never do anything wrong and must be trusted unequivocally to the point of not requiring them to base regulations with enormous economic and environmental and human impact on actual, reproducible science.

There's definitely no way that you're the dupe.

As far as I know, the EPA doesn't regulate people's beliefs about the origin of the universe.

Well, more accurately, it's the problem with idiots, or more simply, with humanity.