Just one more edit.
Lindsey Graham: “Homegrown terrorism is a real threat. There are a lot of people being radicalized on the Internet”
Graham wraps all his paranoid anxieties, whether genuine or for the benefit of his owners, into such a tidy package.
It’s true, as Sanchez observes, that “the owners of Megaupload don’t seem like particularly sympathetic characters,” but he also details that there are difficult and weighty issues that would have to be resolved to prove they engaged in criminal conduct. Megaupload obviously contains numerous infringing videos, but so does YouTube, yet both sites also entail numerous legal activities as well. As Sanchez put it: “most people, presumably, recognize that shutting down YouTube in order to disable access to those videos would not be worth the enormous cost to protected speech.”
We should restore due process in in America so we can stop limply discussing whether people are “terrorists” after they have been assassinated, whether web site operators were “pirates” after they have been driven off the internet. Parroting all-purpose “bad guy” labels on broadcast media to explain government violence after the fact is not justice, it’s the abandonment of it.
The second problem with Hasan’s thesis is that it woefully overestimates the health of the western polity. The “more effective” remedies offered by Hasan are political engagement, awareness/education, and community action. Unless they are coupled with the creation of alternative infrastructure, his suggestions constitute no remedy at all. We must build precisely because our system of government is fatally corrupt. Congress passes odious and unpopular legislation at every turn; they are beholden to those that finance their campaigns.
The Sept. 11-era law was supposed to help the intelligence community gather data on suspected terrorists. But competitors overseas are using it as a way to discourage foreign countries from signing on with U.S. cloud computing providers like Google and Microsoft: Put your data on a U.S.-based cloud, they warn, and you may just put it in the hands of the U.S. government.
Quite right.
Federal law enforcement agents celebrated cyber-Monday in their own peculiar fashion by seizing 150 websites to go along with the 72 they bagged last year. And now the agencies are using the captured trophies to blast movie piracy—even though many of the sites had little to do with the film industry and nothing in the law says they can use them this way.
Make no mistake about it: this is a kill switch, and if it’s passed, it will revisit us for years to come in ways we never suspected possible. If you think that’s an overstatement, think about it again next time you’re posing naked for the TSA, and ask yourself how that came about.
You know how the politicians are always saying we need to be competitive with China? Well, we are about to get super competitive when it comes to internal censorship of the global Internet.
The assistance from the agency that conducts electronic spying overseas is part of an effort by American banks and other financial firms to get help from the U.S. military and private defense contractors to fend off cyber attacks, according to interviews with U.S. officials, security experts and defense industry executives.
Will the corporate welfare for too-big-to-fail banks (and NoVa defense contractors) never cease? It would be so great if some tiny portion of my tax money went to making my world a nicer place instead of lining the pockets of total a-holes.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has also warned banks of particular threats amid concerns that hackers could potentially exploit security vulnerabilities to wreak havoc across global markets and cause economic mayhem.
Yes, computer security is hard, we get it. Do banks get it? Security costs money. But luckily, banks have lots of this thing, this “money”. Maybe they should redirect some portion of their glorious profits towards better security and away from bonuses for a-holes. That would be a terrible, tragic thing, and we are so sorry that computers and the internet were invented, making all of this inevitable, but that’s the way it is.
Did banks used to keep our money in cardboard boxes until the government came along and built proper vaults for them? What precisely do they regard as their responsibility—sending junk mail for credit cards?
Data shared with Congress by security experts, however, suggests strongly that the nation-state in question was China and that the infrastructure used in the attacks had been active long before RSA was breached.
If that’s the case, we must physically go to war with China, cause that’s what we said we’d do. Giddy up!
What’s just as stunning as the fact that supporters of PROTECT IP still can’t figure out how this is really, really bad, is that they also don’t realize how this pretty much destroys any argument the US makes around the globe in trying to protest political censorship. Some claim it’s entirely different, but it’s not. Both involve a government entity deciding that websites cannot be reached without a trial.
