Rally Against Mass Surveillance Livestream [video]
rally.stopwatching.us
rally.stopwatching.us
dig MX stopwatching.us | grep -c google.com
>>> 6
curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c 'google.*\.com'
>>> 6
curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c facebook.com
>>> 1
curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c youtube.com
>>> 0
curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c youtube-nocookie.com
>>> 1
hey, at least someone /thought/ about it
curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c typekit.net
>>> 1
curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c twitter.com
>>> 5
curl https://rally.stopwatching.us/ |grep -c cloudflare.com
>>> 3
EDIT: I should note that these could be harmless <a...> links, but most aren't, and I'm too lazy to update the regexes and rerun. You get the point though.
Why does every website come with 10thousand f#cking scripts loaded in the background? I hate this. Host your own goddamn js, fonts and whatnot.
> Rally Against Mass Surveillance Livestream [video] (stopwatching.us)
http://i.imgur.com/SePrtYk.png
The tracking beacons on all the sponsor companies' sites also confuse me.
Also, a group of HN users (taskforce.is) built the StopWatching website. Big shoutout to Thomas Davis and Beau Gunderson for a load of hard work on the site.
Also a thank you to tintup.com for sponsoring this great event feed -> http://www.tintup.com/thomasdavis-1382673881
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/20/how_to_te...
If you already have, you should have a serious word with your headmaster.
If knowledge is power then the corollary is necessarily that privacy is freedom.
We can unpack that some, because it turns out that it's supported by evidence. Studies have shown that people who know they are under surveillance change their behavior. They don't challenge the status quo or participate in creative destruction because they fear being punished for it.
In general, mass surveillance is a tool for the few to control the many. It allows government officials to destroy popular movements by detecting and disrupting them early in their evolution before they gain enough political power to stand on their own. Governments engaging in this sort of political espionage is a historical fact.
Take the analogy of the federal government issuing every member of the NYPD a Humvee and a machine gun, in case they have to fight Taliban insurgents on the streets of New York. Doing so is hugely objectionable, not because we like the Taliban, but because the number of Taliban in New York is small and the number of innocent civilians is large, so the innocent civilians become by far the largest category of individuals who end up eating one of those bullets.
That's the problem with mass surveillance. Government surveillance is a tool of destruction. The reason the NSA is engaged in this surveillance isn't so that they can send you a reminder when you forget to pick up your kid from soccer practice, it's so that they know where to send soldiers to destroy the enemy. But when 99.99% of the people under surveillance are upstanding citizens, what you have is a powerful weapon which we leave sitting around idle just waiting for corruption to take root and redefine who the enemy is.
I'm as curious as the next person about how what they do is constitutional under the 4th amendment. I'm as against the idea of a police state, and am concerned about the direction of this country in a post-9/11 world as those at the protest. But there's two sides to every issue (often more), and on this one all we get is a bunch of awful PR that has to be walked back. I don't think it's a 100% useless and/or nefarious operation.
Is there nothing positive the NSA/US Government can tell us about these tactics that wont compromise their mission?
They probably think that they can just stay silent and the public outrage will quietly sizzle out.
It's certainly looking like that stance will be justified.
i am posting my entire life on the internet for anyone to see, how dare you look at me.
It's a difficult topic, of course. Opponents of libertarians are quick to point out that the libertarian agenda leads into quite the dystopia. In particular, on the topic of surveillance, it seems fairly clear that at least the hardcore libertarians (in the direction of anarcho-capitalists and the like) are actually happy with surveillance - as long as it is done by private companies and not by the state.
Now these groups are co-opting or even running this campaign which is ostensibly against mass surveillance. That seems something right out of the libertarian propaganda playbook (for a recent collection of quotes out of this playbook, see here: https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/lying-to-liberals/).
On the other hand, protesting mass surveillance is still a worthy cause. I am not a USian myself, and I can't really tell where I would land on this issue (support stopwatching.us or not) if I were, but it's an important issue to think about.
In the real world of people who aren't professional ideologues, it's good to work with people on common projects even when there are severe disagreements elsewhere. Appearing together doesn't imply any general endorsement, or risk any sort of infection by diabolical libertarian heresies.
The troubling thing is when you implicitly lend support to somebody who then turns around and basically backstabs you on the same topic.
On the topic of surveillance, it seems quite likely that some of those libertarian backers would be more than happy to implement their own mass surveillance. They don't object to mass surveillance on principle, they just object to the state doing it. Simply put, it seems quite likely that they are not friends of individual privacy.
Case in point, as discussed elsewhere in this thread: Why are there so many tracking scripts on the stopwatching.us website?
On a personal note: It's interesting that this was my first negative voted comment on HN in a long time.
True, the libertarian-leaning groups are not going to mind so much about something like audience-tracking scripts, because such things are a pea-shooter threat to privacy, compared to the government's privacy carpet-bombing.
We can defend ourselves and others from Google Analytics, and not wind up in prison for trying. Not so with a state program of total, secret, compulsory surveillance, that's linked with the government's unique scale, permanence, legal immunity, and ability-to-punish.
Against such a threat, those who emphasize the common cause are the good coalition partners. Someone on the sidelines, like the Salon writer, withholding support based on a partisan ideological purity test? Not an impressive coalition partner!