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Comment Re:Data Retention, Bush and Blair (Score 4, Interesting) 61

It is also worth considering why our political and financial elite are so keen with data retention laws:

National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030 report, quotes:

"...major trends are the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a rising middle class whose demands challenge governments, and a Gordian knot of water, food and energy shortages, according to the analysts."

"[enormous caches of data] will enable governments to ' figure out and predict what people are going to be doing' and 'get more control over society,'

We (collectively) pose a risk to the power of the 0.1% going forward, and bills like this are being pushed through in "democratic" nations worldwide to "get more control over society".

Comment Bill follows hot on the heels... (Score 3, Insightful) 79

...of the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030 report, where:

...major trends are the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a rising middle class whose demands challenge governments, and a Gordian knot of water, food and energy shortages, according to the analysts.

[enormous caches of data] will enable governments to “figure out and predict what people are going to be doing” and “get more control over society,”

Make no mistake, we (collectively) pose a risk to the power of the 0.1% going forward, and bills like this are being pushed through in "democratic" nations worldwide. Sadly we as a group always seem to vote against our best interests, so being aware of the long term trend is probably not going to change anything (thanks corporate media).

Comment Re:I still don't get it... (Score 4, Interesting) 306

Talking of stupid, anybody who takes this IPCC "draft" trolling seriously are being duped. The IPCC are climate change deniers, hiding behind a thin veil that can hardly be called "science"

The end game of the massive well funded disinformation campaign being to influence as many people as possible into taking strong climate change denial opinion. The problem is, the likes of Fox news and troll news like this one are succeeding very well in this aim, http://environment.yale.edu/climate/the-climate-note/>as this graph shows. Science and evidence be damned.

IPCC Disinformation campaign:

The slide above comes from the presentation of Hans von Storch to the InterAcademy Review of the IPCC, presented earlier this week in Montreal. The slide references the misrepresentation of the issue of disasters and climate change by the IPCC. von Storch is very clear in his views:

IPCC authors have decided to violate the mission of the IPCC, by presenting disinformation.

Not only did the IPCC misrepresent the science of disasters and climate change, but went so far as to issue a highly misleading press release to try to spin the issue and put an unprepared IPCC WG2 chair on the BBC to try to defend the undefensible. I was promised a response from the IPCC to my concerns, a response that has never been provided.

A former head of the IPCC, Robert Watson, says the following in the context of the 2035 glacier issue, but could be equally applied to the disaster issue:

To me the fundamental problem was that when the error was found it was handled in a totally and utterly atrocious manner.

The IAC Review of the IPCC is fully aware of this issue, and it will be interesting to see what their report says on the topic. Meantime, the IPCC is continuing its preparations for its next assessment in business-as-usual fashion.

Comment Re:This is truly a difficult situation (Score 1) 369

Your post (and that article) describe the failures of Scott J.

Your are correct, but think: Who appointed Scott J. Bloch to that position, who is protecting him in the courts, and who is appointing his replacement(s)?

Blame one man all you want, however it is the whole institution that has positioned itself against whistleblowers (as demonstrated beyond any doubt by the relentless bipartisan persecution of them).

Comment Re:This is truly a difficult situation (Score 4, Informative) 369

It's called the Office of Special Counsel and it has demonstrated its complete and utter failure. No whistleblower in their right mind would attempt to use it given its history:

While the Department of Justice relentlessly pursues, prosecutes and imprisons inconvenient whistleblowers, high-ranking bureaucrats who violate their rights are usually coddled by the system. The crooked wheel of justice crushes those at the lower levels of the government and pushes up criminals in high places.

  • Knowingly and willfully ignoring whistleblower disclosures;
  • Dismissing and closing hundreds of whistleblowing complaints without investigation

  • Deleting hundreds of files pertaining to whistleblowing disclosures and complaints of retaliation and reprisal;

  • Rolling back protections for federal employees against discrimination based on sexual orientation;

  • Staffing key OSC positions with cronies who shared his discriminatory views;

  • Engaging in retaliatory activities against OSC staffers who opposed his wrongdoing;

  • Assigning interns to issue closure letters in hundreds of whistleblower complaints without investigation;

  • Intimidating OSC employees from cooperating with government investigators;

  • Misusing prosecutorial power for political purposes;

  • Reducing the backlog of cases pending at the OSC by 56% percent by closing cases without an investigation and destroying electronic files;

  • During the fiscal year of 2008, the OSC filed 0 corrective action petitions with the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB);

  • During the fiscal year of 2008, the OSC obtained 0 stays from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB);

  • Bloch reassigned his perceived critics within the OSC to field offices across the country – giving them 10 days to accept, or else they'd be fired;

  • Bloch imposed retaliatory transfers upon OSC staffers he perceived as having a "homosexual agenda";

  • OSC under Bloch rarely recognized legitimate whistleblowers, typically only when the whistleblower has already prevailed elsewhere;

Comment Re:This is truly a difficult situation (Score 5, Interesting) 369

The shenanigans go much deeper than you realize:

"The mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies," he says. Assange also discusses the United States’ targeting of WikiLeaks. "The Pentagon is maintaining a line that WikiLeaks inherently, as an institution that tells military and government whistleblowers to step forward with information, is a crime. They allege we are criminal, moving forward," Assange says. "Now, the new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the Pentagon is trying to hammer in to the legal system, and which the Department of Justice is complicit in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States." [includes rush transcript]

Comment Re:Growing market (Score 2) 178

Well it could be true that there's a growing market, and you'll definitely find people on Slashdot who are part of that market, but could we have some stats? Why does it "certainly" seem that the market is growing?

Anecdotal evidence: Privacy search plugins like Google Sharing appear to have fast growing userbase/# of reviews etc, many more each time I upgrade and check them anyway.

Comment Re:Retaliation (Score 2) 182

Is there any way to know if you're retaliating against the correct target?

Does "hack back into the system from which the attack originated" == "retaliating against" or is it merely investigation into the perpetrators?

Considering many bot nets are state run (think wikileaks take-downs) Id venture that the answer official will always be "No, do not investigate [our possible] botnet activity"

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