- Before Snowden, if you spoke about these issues, you were dismissed as paranoid.
- After Snowden, if you dismiss these issues, you are dismissed as hopelessly naive...
Oh, also - considering all this - you can bet that Intel's Management Engine has likely been backdoored by the NSA, so using Intel's processors is not recommended, especially if you're a non-US company... (industrial espionage !)
https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf
I’ve been telling people for years, but nobody listened.
Now everyone knows it’s true, but still nobody seems to care…
And for one more sentance, that is a work of pure genius: “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” <3
And how the world is changing, from GDPR to California privacy law... I would just love to shake hand to this guy.
As one obvious example, LGBT Russians had absolutely nothing to hide, right up until the moment it was outlawed, again. Then suddenly it was extremely easy to identify and persecute.
In a world where we hold people like Willem Arondeus, Sophie Scholl or anyone else involved in hiding or exfiltrating Jews during WW2 a hero, it baffles me that the idea of "nothing to hide" even exists. The fact we've made a modern kinder-transport or even a resistance nearly technologically impossible honestly stops me sleeping.
I find this sentence interesting because it is very specific to the American public. I am European and personally I care a lot more about privacy than free speech, and America's obsession with free speech boggles my mind.
It might have to do with the last time we in Europe experimented with unadulterated free speech, and got Hitler and WW2 as a result. We might have dialed it back a bit after that. But what do I know ?
There seems to be some a profound divide between America and Europe on this front and I haven't quite put my finger on why yet.
But free speech is not absolute, even in USA (libel laws and all that).
What I find interesting is how the threshold between the freedom of speech and the freedom of others people is set differently between US and most of Europe.
For instance you can be convicted for incitement to ethnic or racial hatred in a lot of European countries [1] while to the best of my knowledge this kind of speech is protected in the US.
Personally I am very happy with how the free speech threshold is set in France or Germany but I have no doubt it is a cultural thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitement_to_ethnic_or_racial...
*Unless it's from the government in which case it's absolute.
It sounds like a quote from "Animal Farm", doesn't it? I am free to say anything I like, but if I say the wrong thing, I get punished for it. Also, "some are more equal than others".
Not quite. You did not quote a critical part -- being free from consequences from the government. And as governments, almost everywhere, give themselves a monopoly on the use of force "if I say the wrong thing I get punished for it" does not apply.
Thus whoever wants to punish you needs to petition the government for help and prove their case -- if I make false claims that you consider damaging you can ask the government to help and prove your case in a civil court (instead of, say, punching me in the snout to punish me directly). Just my 2c.
For example-- that famous one where the hedgehog pornography tycoon runs an add in his magazine accusing one of the pigs of having sex with his own mom, and then is cleared by a panel of pig judges who rule that parody is protected speech.
Where is that passage in Animal Farm? Maybe I don't have the details correct, but I certainly remember reading a long passage where Orwell clearly establishes that a book of satire like Animal Farm itself would be allowed in the Animal Farm universe. I thought it was such a nice touch of optimism in an otherwise dreary book. (And if I remember correctly it was a welcome respite from those long boring passages of complicated libel case law in the animal world.)
Libel is special because it's purely a civil matter and usually has to prove malicious intentions.
Compare that to: Poland, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia.4 are European and 2 not. Yet it is a criminal charge if you do. And in Saudi Arabia, it's a terrorist charge.
Why did you post it?
Because you know it's controversial and would create engagement.
If the nazi salute wasn't controversial (and rightfully considered hate crime) you would have ignored it.
BTW the first amendment does not condone hate speech.
Because even USA understands that there is a limit on everything.
Mainly as the defendant hadn't, despite the judge's specific encouragement, bothered to submit a proper defence or explore freedom of expression. So it could only be decided purely on the breach of the law. Then there were all the surrounding circumstances of how he set this up.
http://www.scotland-judiciary.org.uk/8/1962/PF-v-Mark-Meecha...
Thankfully in the US we have already codified free speech into law. Unfortunately there are still many who do not consider the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights to be a settled issue.
You might think they are extreme in their views but rulings restricting speech are very, very rare.
And that has severe consequences as you see.
Popper said it many years ago.
Which is slightly different.
No Western-style democracy observes a right to absolutely unrestricted freedom of speech, because it conflicts in obvious ways with other rights. We cannot, for example, incite people to a riot, or yell fire in a crowded theater, or go on the radio and accuse our boss of murdering children. The restrictions against Holocaust denial in Germany (for example) aren't different in kind. Europeans enjoy broad freedom to publish whatever they want about their government, critical or otherwise.
This is in stark contrast with China, Russia, most countries under some form of religious rule, and most dictatorships, where criticizing the government will get you tortured to death or sent to a labor camp at worst, and severely fined and blacklisted from government service at best.
The "median Western European" may have a more nuanced view on the right to free speech than the median citizen of the United States, but I'd attribute that to a superior education system and decades of trying to undo structural economic injustice rather than a cultural divide (which is complete nonsense, honestly).
You can also go on the radio and accuse your boss of whatever you like in the US as well. You might get sued by your boss in civil court, but the police will not come after you.
You can also deny the Holocaust, that the earth is round, that people have landed on the moon, or anything else. An unfortunate side effect of freedom is that other people will be allowed to say things that you dislike.
Yelling fire in a theater isn't illegal, but deliberately doing something that will cause a panic is.
In the US, you can say whatever you like and you will not be prosecuted or jailed. That is simply not true in most other countries.
I drew the obvious contrast with most of the rest of the world in the parent comment, I have nothing more to say there.
> It might have to do with the last time we in Europe experimented with unadulterated free speech, and got Hitler and WW2 as a result.
Um, I'm not sure what they put in your history books over there, but I'm certain that's not an accurate characterization of how that happened.
You forget that Hitler's ideas were popular at the time - that's why he was elected. Slowly but surely it was the free speech of Jews, their very ability to combat the incoming tyranny before it was to late, was clamped down on.
As such, censorship was quite popular.
Free speech levels the playing field between government and people.
(Quoting: //wiki/Mussolini)
regards from germany (-;
Edited: Typo
I think freedom of the press and freedom of association come before that.
In fact the first thing Mussolini did when he won the election (not without the help of violence, verbal but more importantly physical, like Hitler also did after him) was to abolish the free press and make all the other parties illegal.
2) Verbal 'violence' is a fallacy. It doesn't exist.
Your Address is: $address
Your phone is: #ph
You work at: $employer
You did X abhorrent thing (fakes picture or video with deepfakes). It would be a shame if something happened to you.
-------------------------------
That right there is indeed verbal violence, AND a call to arms to enact violence against you.
Only the incitement to violence could possibly be considered violence, though I personally would say it is NOT violence, but a separate offence.
Believe me, my grangrandfather and my grandfather were jailed many times in the 20 years of fascist regime because they refused to swear as fascists.
They were two gentle men who worked as tailors.
Example: Pasquino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasquino
2) I'm a polite Italian using ancient words: it's what we call hate speech today.
We also needed Americans to save us Europeans from those other Europeans.
Aside from being really smug about Europe's supposed superiority today, this comment is just factually misleading. For one thing, it wasn't "unadulterated free speech" that got Hitler into a position of dictatorial power, it was backroom politics, legal manipulation, and finally laws and a German constitution that were extremely pliant towards misuse and reinterpretation for the sake of dictatorship, with all kinds of clauses in favor of martial law, censorship and so forth that the Nazis used to powerful effect once Hitler was appointed chancellor. Had they been dealing with something more absolutist about freedoms like the U.S constitution, his road to dictatorship would have been much more difficult, chancellor or no. You actually have the whole thing about the value of rigidly preserved freedoms exactly backwards in your claim about Hitler and free speech.
In other words: Hitler's rabidly racist speeches never once won him a single electoral victory in Germany (and this even at a time when anti-semitism and racism were much more popular). The much greater damage was done by a weak constitution ridden with clauses against individual freedom, which couldn't effectively stop Hitler from becoming a dictator once he got the chancellors office.
Not my claim, it was the GP's claim and I was also disagreeing with it.
That just about sums up every bad act.
Lots of people were aware of all the bank fraud and toxic loans leading to the 2008 real estate bubble, no one cared leading up to it, and no one cares now.
The Googles/Facebooks/amazons are collecting and doing unsavory things with your data, whether you ever used their services or not (shadow accounts), no one seems to care.
Governmental spying on citizens? Hell the Government had a program which included secret kill lists, flew military bombers into foreign countries to drop bombs and kill a citizen. Even when the US failed to kill the citizen and the family sued, their case was dismissed as the courts denied any right to know who was on the list, how they got on the list, and even denied acknowledging the list existed...yet no one cared.
Imagine a foreign country flying military missions in the US and dropping bombs on a foreigner in the US, based on the foreign governments secret kill lists. It's pure insanity.
Do we really think that they are any better 50 years later because I don't.
(Also, not unprecedented - the Russians have been doing something very similar in a few high-profile UK cases...)
Of course, the main issue is that those "surgical" drone strikes still seem to have backfired strategically -
I wonder what is the state of these "who are we going to kill today" reunions under Trump ?
And of course in the background there's the whole Middle Eastern situation where the USA (and previously the British Empire) have only been making things worse for a century or so... but the control over those oil fields is just too important for them to let go !
Far as weakening, we were noting they did a lot of things that were public knowledge that indicated they prioritized shoddy products and surveillance over security. I had an essay listing most of them. I might dig it up and submit it Thursday if anyone is interested.
In hindsight, I was right, but I didn't get with the program after 9/11 (see the accounts of William Binney [1] and Edward Snowden's recently Permanent Record).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...
(Well, and GAFAM's behavior in the recent years certainly didn't help either...)
P.S.: Got Stallman to sign my The Snowden Files book after he introduced his speech with asking the public to give "three cheers for Snowden"...
Unless you communicate why we need to do sth anyways and what small managable steps can be taken it is hard to tackle this alone, even if you are an informed person with the motivation and the breathing space to do so.
So unless the felt pain and the impeding doom doesn’t exceed the threshold of “oh shit this isn’t fine, what was I thinking!” people will just call the whole thing off as unmanagable and move ahead.
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_op_de_inlichtingen-_en_vei... (article also available in German and Chinese)
I'm a proponent of binding referendum, but I don't see how it would solve the problem in this case.
I know young wealthy people who don’t know who Elon Musk is. People’s attention is highly fragmented.
In general, the mainstream media didn't make much of it. At the time they hadn't yet tied outrage to revenue/profits. If Snowden were to happen today the coverage and reaction would be much different.
But alas, it's too late. The public has it in their minds it was a non-issue. That seems unlikely to change any time soon.
The author dismisses CPU-level backdoors in favor of Intel ME backdoors mainly on the basis that, since CPUs can't save state, they can't protect themselves against replay-"attacks", and hence Intel would lose any sort of plausible deniability once an "activation sequence" was ever found in the wild.
But I don't really see how ME is protected against replay-"attacks" either. Sure, you might not be able to replay the sequence to the same CPU, but you can definitely replay it to a different CPU - unless every single CPU out there has a different activation sequence, which is possible, but would be vastly less efficient (if you want to hack someone you now have to know / guess some sort of unique production ID of the CPUs he's using?).
I'm really not seeing the big argument in favor of an ME backdoor here. A backdoor directly in the CPU would work just as well.
Arguably better in fact, since the CPU can just look for the activation sequence in the data it reads (if you send an e-mail or website it's very likely the plaintext string gets copied, and therefore read, by the CPU at some point), whereas the ME processor would only be able to watch specific offsets in memory.
The one they'd use the most was deniable looking flaws in ME. They'd reserve their best ones for most important cases with lowest chances of detection. Maybe even with personal physically there activating it with a RF signal. Could integrate wireless in something called Centrino to make that easier. Take a pile of hard cash and lots of defense sales as a thank you.
There isn't a hope in hell you can reliably keep track of who has which Intel CPU.
Think of all the stages involved, and how each one has to cooperate and how many times Intel's CPU is sitting on "undifferentiated palette of X units".
But that's usually not the interesting case. The interesting case is that you find a new target, and that target already has a PC/laptop, and you want to gain access to it without having to physically infiltrate. Now, you might be able to manipulate their network in some way, or send them an E-Mail, or get them to visit a website that contains an activation code. But having to backtrack which CPU that laptop contains seems impossible to me in the vast majority of cases. Even if you can somehow figure out where he bought it, most stores aren't even going to be able to tell you the serial number of the product they sold, and even if they can, now you have to match that serial number to a CPU, which is... impossible? How would you get that information? Retailers buy hundreds of thousands of CPUs, and they probably don't tell Intel which CPU they put into which device, or even who buys which individual CPU. If you send a CPU back on Amazon, they don't even check if it's the same goddamn model! (Hence the surprise of some people who bought a $550 CPU and got a $550 CPU box with a $50 CPU in it.) And if the CPU or laptop was bought used, now you're really out of luck. I really don't see how this is very useful, when instead of doing that you can just force Intel to give up plausible deniability and hack everything in sight. If you get caught (which is incredibly unlikely in the first place), you just say "we did it for America!" and that's it, nobody would care. I mean Intel would be kinda fucked, but the NSA wouldn't be.
The issue with supply chain tracking is the sharing of information. If every part of the supply chain is hacked then you have all of the info. You also need to look at it backwards: instead of "who has X" ask "where did X go" which is easier to answer. It starts at the source, the factory, which can know which serial was in which lot. Then you know where that got shipped, etc.
Maybe occasionally units get "lost" but you do have error bounds on their location.
But it’s like nothing happened. No investigation, no nothing. If they can’t be bothered by that, it’s little surprise they’re not bothered by their spying on regular folk.
That was in 2009. I remember being kind of stunned that nobody seemed to care that the executive branch blackmailed an elected Rep. Log rolling and pork barrelling is fine, but blackmail seems like a bridge too far.
You have to wonder if the French government would have allowed the sale (as an example).
Seems like the conservatives don't give a shit about strategic national companies as long as the cheques clear.
Guy makes six figured, works remotely as an NSA contractor from Hawaii, suddenly had a moral conscience, somehow had multiple laptops with classified data, leaves his smoking hot girlfriend to meet journalists from The Guardian and Der Spegiel and gave them evidence that was composed of poorly made slides; almost all of which have been released heavily redacted -- all have been heavily dismissed by the US government, Yahoo, Google, Verizon and others. Honestly, the 9/11 truth evidence feels like it should have been more convincing, and yet every media agency took this as gospel.
If the revelations are taken at face value, why couldn't it also be possible this was all just a test by intelligence agencies? Companies have strengthened their general security and the general population hasn't .. really cared. Both of those are valuable pieces of information gathered by the government.
Look at COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird. At the time, if you had said such programs existed, it would have been viewed as crazy conspiracy. But they did exist and intelligence agencies in the US government has manipulated their own people in past decades.
Either Snowden is incredibly clever and lucky, or he's a stage show. He should be in the situation Assange is in now. It's difficult to believe he's still in an unknown location, hiding out in Russia. The whole story stinks and I feel like no one wants to have a rational talk about the alternative: that it may be more manipulation and testing to show that Americans don't really care about surveillance.
> It's difficult to believe he's still in an unknown location, hiding out in Russia.
Wouldn't this make Russia a party to this theory? As far as I can tell they don't deny harboring Snowden, which if he wasn't actually there hiding from the USG wouldn't they call the US on that?
Want to know about his motivation and background? Read his new book and watch Citizenfour. He explains what lead him to be a whistleblower.
> all have been heavily dismissed by the US government, Yahoo, Google, Verizon and others
Completely untrue. Much of it has been confirmed. If it was fake the government wouldn't be charging him with espionage.