NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show (2013)
washingtonpost.com
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The "old" generation (voting to leave the EU) clearly understands the value of their vote(s).
If they'd had 75% turnout they may have swung the election.
In mid 2013 there were about 5.8m people between 18 and 24.
Which is what percentage of the voting population?
If we assume all of them can vote 5.8m is 11% of 51.8m.
I would assume that is not the case here, but its something to consider.
Instead, maybe they actually were apathic, and their votes would be roughly 50-50 - so Leave could still win.
There were the Remain votes, the Leave votes, but then there the Protest votes -- which from my perspective were votes that said "I want to Remain, but dammit I don't like how things are going right now".
Are election days national holidays in the UK?
Carrying this info in cleartext across tappable international cables is pretty close to giving a free pass to spooks. Telecom regulators are enabling this because they're against/indifferent about strong encryption.
It's a little naive to assume that European countries do not have similar banking issues. Between Switzerland, London, the Channel Islands, Monaco, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands there is more than enough dodgy banking to compete with the US
Likewise with spying and kidnapping - the major European powers have been playing those "games" (and worse) since long before 1776. Extraordinary rendition did not happen without the knowledge of European governments and the UK in particular has a long association with many of the countries where those picked up were interrogated/tortured in.
Clinton: http://time.com/4150694/hillary-clinton-calls-for-more-surve...
Trump (not that it's really necessary): http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26167...
The Baby Boomer generation's influence is waning and I'm optimistic that the next generations who did not grow up in a period of extreme mutual distrust like we saw post-WW2 and during the Cold War will be better suited to lead.
It's going to take us, as a global group of people on the planet, a long time to unwind a lot of the hawkish and nationalist policies that have evolved over the past 150 years. Certainly there will be periods where charismatic leaders with latent agendas drag us backwards and temper the progress, but ultimately if each successive generation is even just a bit more inclusive and globally considerate than the last, we'll find a way to make this work.
Every generation has felt they could do things better than the previous (old people shouldn't be allowed to vote has been stated lately), until they learn what it was the previous generation had to deal with. The mutual distrust among certain parties do go away after time, look at all the countries that were at war in WW2 that are now allies. But there is always somebody that jumps in to take advantage of the newfound peace and harmony to further their agenda. Sometimes it leads to a return of mistrust, sometimes it leads to war.
What you are describing is every agency of authority agreeing with each other across numerous nation-states, economies, cultures, and more. Some of which are directly opposed to each other, possibly violently.
The human race is simply not ready for that level of cooperation and will not for a very long time. Losing sight of that will only lead to hardship and suffering. Likely the only way for such a thing to happen is for it to be forced among people with violence. Then that status maintained for multiple generations until the old ways have been forgotten.
But your way is a nice thought and should be attempted at least.
Really? I'd be interested to see a source on that. Not questioning the validity, I so many of these college aged kids calling for restrictions on speech and political organization of people they disagree with. I'm not surprised that this would come up.
Looks like we can expect a mommy-state as much as we can expect a liberalization of out-dated baby boomer policies.
I wasn't implying I've seen it here, so I hope it didn't come across that way.
2) Facebook and Snapchat and other social venues made possible by the Internet make it hard to sew mutual distrust among the nations of the world. If the Cold War happened today we'd see the propaganda from both sides on Twitter - I think it would be harder to mislead people with 2+ perspectives.
Every generation does think it can do better than the last - but I personally think there are a few major differences to set us apart. :>
> Clinton said she would ask technology companies in Silicon Valley to expand their oversight of posts that could be used to radicalize recruits. Tech companies, she said, should enforce strong service agreements and track questionable content.
She scares me as much as Trump.
> We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. We reject the tracking of citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. We reject torture. We reject sweeping claims of "inherent" presidential power. We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years. We will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine duly enacted law. And we will ensure that law-abiding Americans of any origin, including Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans, do not become the scapegoats of national security fears.
but as we have seen, every word of this has been reversed. I don't trust either party at this point. Both are scalp deep in this.
Pretty sure I've convinced at least a handful of people to vote Gary Johnson as a protest vote. Though personally I'm all about that #Snowden2016
There's always the "oh no what if so and so gets elected" but it always turns out that any major party candidate does pretty much the same stuff once elected. Obama continued and extended the Bush Doctrine on foreign affairs, for example.
But to maximize your influence over a longer time period, you should vote for the third party candidate that most closely matches your views.
Then, when the major party candidate you would have resorted to loses, the post mortem reveals votes lost to the candidate you voted for, and in the subsequent election the major party adapts its platform to win some of those lost votes.
If politicians expected voters to vote on principle and to hold them accountable, we'd have an entirely different sort of politicians.
That might, arguably, resemble truth if the details of the political system itself were guaranteed stable over time and not subject to alteration by the same people who gain power over other policies through electoral victories. But, in the real world, to maximize your influence over a long-time period, you should organize and advocate for both electoral reform and the minor party you most prefer during periods between elections (the former to work to mitigate the perverse effects of the existing system, the second to maximize the likelihood that, in the next election, the competitive major parties -- which can change over time -- will include the party you most prefer.)
But, once its clear who the major candidates are in the present election, you should still generally vote for the one least harmful to your interests if they win.
> If politicians expected voters to vote on principle and to hold them accountable, we'd have an entirely different sort of politicians.
With no changes to the electoral system, what we'd have with that is "major" parties representing even smaller pluralities (well, technically, only the biggest would be a plurality), and more negative campaigning directed by each major candidate at getting voters best served by the other to not vote for them to "hold them accountable" for something. Which is a change of degree, not kind, from what we have now.
I totally agree with this.
>Once its clear who the major candidates are in the present election, you should still generally vote for the one least harmful to your interests
I don't agree with this, because the platform-creation calculus of the major parties is to ignore interest groups that will not abandon ship.
As H's platform makes clear, when there is sufficient loyalty, it's in the best interest of the candidate to edge as close as possible to the opposing party's platform, to attract as many swing voters as possible.
Unfortunately, with Trump (if he's elected), there's a chance not supporting him would mean I'm imprisoned so... you win some, you lose some.
I don't mean to suggest that provincialism is dead and buried but I do think that a 20-year-old today has much greater odds of at least being aware of the views and outlooks of people in other parts of the world than a 20-year old in 1970 or 1980.
Even the US's allies will try stunts as bad as false flag bombings[1]. So it's not like they can only monitor non-allies. So they can't shut down spying, and perhaps it just becomes a never-ending escalation of power then. Might as well grab all data. I don't like it, but I can understand how they might arrive at that position.
Probably the only hope is to outlaw this worldwide, perhaps in some human rights kind of thing, then actually apply punishment for those caught. That seems unlikely to really work though. Even now, we have countries that steal nuclear tech and don't get punished - few will view spying as worse than that.
The American outage at the NSA is entirely correct. The European histrionics are mostly yank-bashing with a side of whistling in the dark.
If I recall correctly, there was much in the media around the time of the Arab Spring about UK and German companies selling the tools of mass surveillance to governments that were less than friendly to their residents. It's easier to point a finger at the US than to acknowledge that the major European governments are usually deeply involved in the same activities and equally responsible for much of the conflict we see in the world today via the legacy of colonialism and actions such as the Sykes–Picot Agreement.
> as a European is; I have zero say in this
Ok, here is another example for you, not involving open warfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
Because it is a treaty that was implemented after a World War? Circumstances of implementation matter. It is also a great example of a treaty that backfired and led to another war due to its sanctions end results. I'll also say you're stretching the analogy of a treaty as a way for a foreign citizen to have a say in another nations affairs. Technically correct but I don't think that really gets at "foreign citizen not of the ruling class of another country influencing another countries military programs (note no espionage examples)" Unless you're looking at a vassal state I don't see it happening.
The non proliferation treaty is similarly a poor example as it was multiple nations deciding in their interests to stay on top with nuclear weapons and not allow more. What would better convince people would be another country impacting another countries military program negatively, not for mutual gain.
The grandparent comment was referring to influencing the NSA surveillance of foreign countries. Guess what, as an American I have no say over the spy agencies of France, or any multitude of agencies either. The NSA just has been doing a better job at it for numerous historical reasons. I'm not condoning it but so far you've not really provided a convincing argument that foreign citizens can influence other countries espionage agencies.
It makes literally no sense to me that a government would have any more concern for another government's citizen than that other government has incentivised it to.
The NSA is a different breed of agency, who can now record whatever everyone reads, hears or says and keep these records almost forever.
The NSA works with the 5 eyes to gather data on you. If you want to stop the NSA from spying on you, vote in your democratic country to remove yourselves from our intelligence agreements.
It doesn't necessarily mean the NSA won't spy on you, but it does mean it will be technically illegal for them to do so, so they probably won't do it unless they actually care about you.
Not that I disagree with the suggestion to put pressure on the partners though.
2 weights, 2 measures...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/nsa-paid-gch...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secre...
And so on.
I also feel that as an individual person, I have no defense against this, partly because it's generally easier to attack a system than to defend it, partly because of the asymmetry of costs in defense vs attack leading to the lack of business or personal justification for effective defense spending, and partly because electronic monitoring and attacks are difficult to investigate by their international nature.
So if American institutions discovered some attack, they would release the information with proper political timing to influence national narrative, thereby inflating their agency importance, or it may further some group goals, the news media may proliferate and bark about it, and no national administration, including the American one, would be surprised at all. It would not update anyone's view of the world in any way.
CCC events have had many presentations about this in the last few years, about IMSI catchers and mobile crypto attacks and abusing roaming mechanisms and databases. And it seems there's more where that came from; the system is wide open in many respects to exploitation by a sophisticated attacker, governmental or not. (I read somewhere that people in China are buying and deploying IMSI catchers in order to send SMS spam to passersby.)
Some of the privacy problems are a result of economic factors including backwards compatibility and international compatibility goals. Some of the bad decisions for privacy were made by or at the behest of intelligence agencies, and some of those decisions are continuing to be made in standards bodies that deal with mobile communications security. Ross Anderson described some spy agency influence in early GSM crypto conversations (which is one reason A5/1 is so weak), and it's still happening at ETSI now.
I support political criticism of surveillance activities, but at moments when people feel overwhelmed and powerless, there is another front, which is trying to clean up the security posture of mobile communications infrastructure, or provide better alternatives to it.
We can find lots of reasons why this is hard ("Bellhead" communities are much less ideologically committed to privacy and opposed to surveillance; communications infrastructure is highly regulated in many places, and it's hard to get access to radiofrequency spectrum; people want worldwide compatibility; there's a huge installed base on both the client and server sides; many of the infrastructure providers around the world are directly beneficially owned by governments; spy agencies do actively try to influence standards-setting in this area, plus sabotaging implementations and stealing private key material) and it's probably going to stay hard. But maybe some of the people reading this are going to some day be tech billionaires or working in or running companies that have significant influence in the telecommunications space, and be in a position to personally make future generations of communication technology take privacy and security seriously.
27TB doesn't sound much, even by 2012 standards. The article doesn't specify if this is the total size, just the delta over some period of time, or something entirely different? Certainly not something NSA would "struggle to ingest"?
Better give them more budget, then they will be able to handle all the data!
The NSA hasn't done anything groundbreaking here, except maybe a Google search.
If you have a face, it's quite trivial to be punched in it. That doesn't make it okay for someone to punch it, much less legal.
The "free country" has total electronic surveillance.
The "federation" is run like an empire in a dictator-like fashion.
And north korea, the "democratic republic", is the most oppressive regime in the world.
What a world we live in.
Whereas if you take some time off from work to attend a protest, the FBI knows to come knocking on your door to ask pointed questions about your friends.
That's what's pernicious about these programs. They're not good enough to focus on terrorists, but there is plenty of fodder for harassment of protesters.
we have a duty to resist this totalitarianism by any means possible or necessary; fascism is here, and free men can't delude themselves with hoping for gradual change to the contrary any further.
This really sickens me. They are inferring so much and therefore many innocent people are and will suffer.
To me this system is pure evil however much the nsa try to sugar coat or spin it. Who gave them the right to do this, to track people around the world and in many cases perform extra judicial assassinations.
Before Snowden, themselves.
After Snowden, the silent citizens/voters that we are did (and continue to do).
Today everything gets buried in a sea of noise and entertainment. Long term this cannot be good for the general health and welfare of society to not ponder on and discuss.
My phone rarely seems to be sure what country it is in, let alone which town.
Simply lost count of the number of times I've been like, "yeah, I'm sure the weather is lovely where I was a week ago, but I'm more interested in where I am now".
Must be quite depressing for the NSA analysts stuck in their cubical watching people run around the world having fun while they stuff another donut down their fat american face.
This isn't great news as a non-American but from their perspective, surely this is just the NSA doing their job?