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Comment by teawithcarl | Hacker News Reader

Why do our taxes in part support this invasion of privacy by NSA/FBI on American citizens ?

Because they'll stick guns at us and throw us in prison if we don't pay them off?

Careful, up-voting this comment will put you on an NSA list.

As I often tell my Mom in phone conversations: The things I'm saying probably have gotten me reviewed by some government agent.

The good news is that if they listen, they'll realize I'm not a terrorist and put me in their "Just a Patriotic American, no problem here" file with 100,000 other people.

If somebody extremely dastardly gets elected who might use that file for harm, I'll just have to flee.

Oh, you missed the statements be the ex-head of the NSA just a couple days ago I take it. He said that government transparency groups are 'the next terrorists.'

Besides, it's not a human you have to fear. It's their automated systems. They'll set up a system to analyze and profile communications, and it will just spit out names. They'll declare those people terrorists and round them up and not charge them with anything. And as long as no individual NSA agent actually reads your communications, everyone will apparently be happy. Well, except for the people getting waterboarded by CIA agents who just KNOW you MUST have done something terrible, because the information they got about you is called "intelligence" and therefore can not be incorrect.

Which will be really easy because our airports and borders are so open.

I think they are pretty open, now, if you are a US citizen (I am). Although there is a federal police force "guarding" them, so they could be closed instantly. If it looks like that might happen, I'll have to leave, or risk staying. Right now, that doesn't seem likely to happen in the immediate future.

DHS just got another budget increase for you...revolutionaries and secessionists are major concerns of every government and are classified as terrorists. Check it out.

I'm actually not advocating a revolution or secession.

A revolution would be a disaster, because the new government would likely be much worse.

Can you tell me where to look for info on this, though? Or do you have a link?

I think what he meant to say about you is that you are probably anyone of the following:

    Nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.

Now lets wait for DHS to drop 90% of its tech support.

If you want to go back to the beginning of where we are today, you probably want to read something like Secret Armies by John Adams. Special forces were spawned to wage low-intensity conflict/warfare and attack or respond to unconventional threats.

The terrorology field has blossomed post-2001 and there are more definitions, but everything still files nicely: state/non-state and religious, political, cultural. If you ask me, they're all the same.

Regardless of what the lawyers--politicians--add to the body of definitions, definitions of terrorism are very gray unlike conventional war.

Low-intensity conflict is how wars are waged today and the definitions aren't as black and white as conventional war.

How is walking into a public space and having a conversation with someone an invasion of privacy?

It's not public in the sense that applies to law enforcement. By that I mean, Noisebridge is a private community that happens to be rather open in terms of membership. "Public space" is more like the sidewalk or a government building.

Note: I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding

By similar logic then, you're saying that what Weev did should be punished under CFAA. The AT&T site was "open" in terms of access but it was "private" because AT&T said it was. Picking and choosing what you think is "public" or "private" on an unsecured, open access server/network is a slippery slope...See Weev's prosecution.

Running a Tor node means you're running a public service. Full stop.

Didn't Weev have a legitimate AT&T account? Isn't that how he discovered the vulnerability in the first place? Seems to me that would make him part of the "AT&T community" to whom the site was open to.

But ignoring all that, the definition of what is open to the general citizenry and what is open to the people representing the government are two distinct things.

This is a very recent example where the law is pretty explicit about what the cops can do versus what the public at large can do:

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15419/exclusive_activi...

Law enforcement, and those acting under color of law, are (rightly) more constrained in their actions than private citizens, in a lot of ways.

I did not read anything about an invasion of privacy. Did I miss it? I am not sure what is worse: ignoring the privacy debate or being the chicken little of privacy.

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