Indeed. The recent NSA revelations are quite bad, but there is a long way to go between that, and forbidding journalistic coverage of Tiananmen Square in '89. That Google/Yahoo/Microsoft saw fit to collaborate with that censorship while building their digital financial empire of data and servers on the internet...

honestly on my end, it was in part due to the fact that I had had to immediately end a #2 ahead of schedule to take the call. On her end, my best guess is that it could betray a slight sense of non-straightforwardness that is not hidden by the fact that the complaint has remained live, and unanswered with a single sentence of explanation for 9 months now. And how it might relate to the interrellation between my complaint and it's fight to enable U.S.A. citizens to host their data on their own services on their own servers at their own homes. (GoogleFiber prohibits any kind of server hosting for residential users in terms of service, and selectively enforces, effectively putting a muzzle on the market for home-server software that could compete with things like gmail/ghangouts/skype/etc)

My conversation with Anna Baughman at the F.C.C. - (see this mod5 comment for the GoogleFiber/NetNeutrality/USNavyInformationWarfareOffice context http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3643919&cid=43438341 )

Incoming from 717 338 2772 to 785 979 7723, 13:26CDT 2013/06/12
--
A: Anna Baughman, FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs
D: Douglas McClendon
--
A: Hi, it's Anna from the FCC, how are you?

D: Hi, I'm OK, uh, I don't suppose I could call you back in 5 minutes

A: Well, Um, Actually I'm leaving here in 5 minutes

D: Oh, never mind then, it's not that big a deal

A: I just wanted to let you know that umm we are again having the Enforcement Beaureu look at this complaint and someone from that office will be in contact with you ... we are not ignoring you

D: (laughs) Ok, that's nice to know, umm, I, I have been worried and the fact that I suppose after nine months (A: right) i can say that its still under some kind of enforcement review should indicate to me that there is at least you believe there is at least some substance even if its confused that you need to educate me about right?

A: right, but we're going to um, i just spoke with my supervisor again and we're going to um hopefully, well no we *will*, someone from E.B. will be in contact with you (D: and). It may take a couple of days but we are on/

D: Ok, a couple days, but, but, not a couple weeks? but not a couple weeks, or a couple months?

A: I would say next week sometime

D: Ok, so if I don't hear back in, if I don't hear back in 2 weeks then I can be worried or call back and start annoying you again

A: just call me back, feel free to call me back anytime but if you want to hang tight for a week or two

D: that thats fine, as long as you tell me that things are being worked on that thats the feedback I need to know to stop bugging you every day

A: Oh, well that's OK, Oh all right, well you have a good day

D: you too thank you

A: bye now

D: ok bye bye

his point was that he believes it is possible. You apparently disagree. My own assessment is that it is possible, or, with the current trajectory of technology and social usage of it, will become possible in the near term (10 years). The way to combat it in my opinion, is to view the sorts that engage in it as criminals, and violaters of the constitution. The silicon valley types like to say "the perception is the reality". If we perceive these people as being legitimate, reasonable actors in our society... well, it's gonna be unfun in my opinion. But if we perceive them as criminals, and engage in an engineering war against them (i.e. I use duct tape to cover the camera on my mobile devices phones, but if we were at war with the spooks, there would be reasonable market share of phones with hard dip switch banks to cut the power/signal to the cam, mic, accelerometers, antennas, etc. I may be deluding myself that such physical things will be useful for long with ever shrinking scale nanotech. But the fact that anyone who has tried has failed utterly, due, I think to the buying public's lack of education about what these devices are really being used for (by the 'other users' of 'their' device), then I think such products would have at least somewhat succeeded in the market in the last 10 years. But it seems more that the NSA has successfully suppressed technical literacy to the point where our populace is ripe for the surveillance harvesting.

1. automated more efficient and thus more financially profitable marketing and advertising.

2. political persecution. It's hard to get away with an old-school execution style A-list B-list purge, though certainly correlating the accelerometer data of mobile phones with the words on the web page visible at that second makes the list sorting much easier, if you don't care much about some false positives. And you can get your B list down from 50% to 1%, because computer targeting based on aggregated data really just is that good.

3. insider trading.

4. ratfucking anyone and everyone, from your brother, to the local congresscritter's close relatives under the age 14 that you don't like.

5. lots more shit that would keep me more awake at night than I can afford if I bothered to not repress the thoughts.

Both pure capitalism, and pure communism work great... *in theory*. In practice, you find out that when people are not 'like minded' ('hive minded'), things work out much more messily. The people who suffer the higher level of scrutiny will come to know it. Secrets don't stay secret. And you don't have to be convicted of a crime, to have your livelyhood, and abiity to help provide for and protect your family extremely compromised. It is not the "non-misuse" of these systems that is most worrying (even though I do find it patently objectionable). It is the innevitable, and so vast it's almost unquantifiable temptation to abuse these systems for financial and other predatory gain (the prey being those without equivalent access to the systems), that will lead to their extreme abuse. Think the SS, or the Stasi. The end of the road is a 24/7 camera aimed at your bed, and your involuntary choice to have faith that such a system will be used to the benefit of you or humanity, and not as a tool for its sale into cyberslavery.

residential citizens are almost universally prohibited from running servers via terms of service and lack of competing alternatives with equivalent bandwidth rates and better terms of service. This is the blueprint for how a dictatorship can control the internet. Star topology. Centralized Services and tap points. Distributed encrypted communication like that of pgp/gpg combined with smtp node servers including your local workstation (a system familiar to old geeks) is simply not an option in a dictatorship, because, strong encryption is pretty strong.

best 4 score 0 post thread I've read ever probably. Lets enjoy this spectacle while it lasts. I for one, will pray that things get more better than worse. I say the three of us form a fake betting pool for fun, speculating on when the next spectacle will be, that involves the govt engaging in slurping mic and camvideo data from mobile phones when they are not making calls. We can make a seperate pool for when the next spectacle after that happens, and it is discovered that they have been slurping the same sensor data while the phone is allegedly 'off' (soft-off reprogrammed to be a black-screen, silent audio and leds app).

Good thing there is a good corn crop each year (here in my home state where I've been openly growing cannabis for the last 18 months or so). We'll never run out of popcorn.

you sound a little like the Ayn Randian Libertarian I was 20 years ago. I suggest you pay a little more attention to the intimacy that our relatively recent history with outright slavery, and subtler forms of exploiting those who in various large subsets of humanity, have had their freedom of speech severely curtailed with no recourse to any effective system of justice.

Not only do I think your final sentence borders on silly (that the person you are replying to is the 'root cause' of these woes), but I think you are generally wrong. Having social safety nets in place, amongst a system that is almost unavoidably quite leisse-fair predatory (predatory in the sense that some of the winners are completely content winning while directly profiting from some of the losers that they are clearly, directly, stifling the free speech or other rights of)- ... is a good idea.

Now, I do believe that charity should generally be voluntary. But giving a person shelter, food, and clothing, rather than watching them waste away in the elements, is not only a pleasant thing to do, but also overall net profitable to everyone who failed to see the better wisdom of putting forth the effort necessary to have those safety nets sufficiently in place that there is no demand for a governmental safety net.

While it might be logical and judicial to impeach Obama for this, in a colorblind way, I think we need to remember that his is the first non-white male leader of a nation with a relatively recent history of slavery against a large portion of his racial heritage.

But your general point, that the justice system has become farcical due to the unpunished justice of the prior administration, is spot on.

I myself therapeutically grow cannabis in the Free State of Kansas.

umm... https dude

this

we are not crazy. They are misleading us, and it gets insane when they feel so guilty that have to resort to these tactics.

I think the standard answer is- get a job, work hard, get trust (misplaced or not), power, and money, then get access to the systems that are ripe for abuse. Then you will face a moral dilemna. On the one hand you could abuse those systems to gain more power and money. On the other hand you could pretend that they don't exist. On the other other hand, you could become an NSA whistleblower, and wonder what they will do to your wife and kids at GITMO. It's a toughey.

Only if your intent was to mislead spectators of this debate. Since clearly these "militants" would actually be fighting _against_ the subset of "militants" that the U.S. forces were fighting against.

So for the purposes of this discussion, *NO*, the people in group B would not be called "militants" because at least superficially, they are specifically the kind of resident native that our government at least claims to be interested in protecting, not executing.

Or perhaps I'm too intoxicated to be trying to parse your sentence. But the general idea is that there are some "militants" in foreign countries whose goal is to slaughter as many civilian US citizens as possible. And there are some "militants" whose goal is stay in their home and raise their families, and wish to harm no US citizen blindly (now, they may have a personal beef with somebody, but they aren't out to kill citizens due to their specific citizenship). And from where I'm standing, it seems like your comment was meant to somehow confuse the two groups. Probably your just a semantic troll. But we are talking about killing people, via remote control, who bore the unfortune of having parents who fucked in a part of the world that decades later happened to become very dangerous for people that stubbornly just want to live in the land they were born in. And the more of those we kill, and literally propogandistically write off as "militants", the more dozens of people will fantasize about suicide missions killing the appeasing populace of the country that accidentally droned their family member to bits, for being the wrong gender, and age, and skin color, in the wrong geographic region that happened to be their homeland, at the wrong time. Or so it seems to me.

Former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has had since September 2012 to respond to my complaint about GoogleFiber joining the "any kind of server prohibited to residential ISP internet users". His administration at the FCC refused to give me in all this time, a single sentence explaining to me whether they agreed with any or all of my complaint that started as a sub-1000 character 2000F complaint, and evolved to a 53 page small font dead tree document delivered by the office of my state's Attorney General asking them to take the issue back over. That was back in 2012 as well. I still wait for a single sentence suggesting whether or not network neutrality can be thought of bidirectionally, in the naturally as-designed symmetric InternetProtocol(v6 in this case), as giving consumers a right to provide their own independent (of any mandated corporate or government service affiliation) service via servers connected to their "neutral" residential internet jack.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3643919&cid=43438341