I say this as a tech person: screw putting this stuff in a database. I would suggest the far more low tech solution of a burn barrel, some kerosene, and matches, if we’re worried about how much federal dollars we’re wasting. That money would be far better spent on cops who spend their time catching real criminals. I’m done being “reasonable” with these people. The passage of SAFE in New York, the bills currently in Congress, and Colorado should be a wakeup call that they will pass whatever they can get away with. Gun control must go the way of the temperance movement.
http://www.pagunblog.com/2013/03/19/making-a-registry/
The Internet is a surveillance state
(CNN) -- I'm going to start with three data points.
One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.
Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.
Bruce Schneier
And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels -- and hers was the common name.
Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell's identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.
Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there's more. There's location data from your cell phone, there's a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.
This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.
Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that allow us to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters.
There are simply too many ways to be tracked. The Internet, e-mail, cell phones, web browsers, social networking sites, search engines: these have become necessities, and it's fanciful to expect people to simply refuse to use them just because they don't like the spying, especially since the full extent of such spying is deliberately hidden from us and there are few alternatives being marketed by companies that don't spy.
This isn't something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services are interested in tracking us. Visit a website and it will almost certainly know who you are; there are lots of ways to be tracked without cookies. Cellphone companies routinely undo the web's privacy protection. One experiment at Carnegie Mellon took real-time videos of students on campus and was able to identify one-third of them by comparing their photos with publicly available tagged Facebook photos.
Maintaining privacy on the Internet is nearly impossible. If you forget even once to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the wrong thing, and you've permanently attached your name to whatever anonymous service you're using. Monsegur slipped up once, and the FBI got him. If the director of the CIA can't maintain his privacy on the Internet, we've got no hope.
In today's world, governments and corporations are working together to keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect -- occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer -- to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they're not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want.
Fixing this requires strong government will, but they're just as punch-drunk on data as the corporations. Slap-on-the-wrist fines notwithstanding, no one is agitating for better privacy laws.
So, we're done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites.
And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet-surveillance/index.html?c=&page=1
HURT: We’re from the government and we’re here to learn everything about you
Rage over the waste and injustice of agents sent by the federal government to bang on doors of law-abiding citizens to ask probing, creepy questions is normally something that bubbles up only every 10 years. But ever since the federal government became a cancerous leviathan, the outrage is now an annual occurrence.
The first census in 1790 asked a bare minimum of questions essential for establishing congressional districts of equal populations. Despite the abhorrent practice of slavery at the time — and the counting of blacks for purposes of their fractional apportionment — the whole endeavor was aimed at fairness.
In the 223 years since, the census has spawned an entire federal bureaucracy with tentacles reaching into the farthest hidden crannies of the country. It asks darkly invasive questions that are unnecessary at best.
At worst — which is almost always the case with the Federales — the questions are aimed at twisting fairness inside out. It is how bureaucrats in the federal government summarily pick winners and losers in some small town thousands of miles away.
So, drunk on this power and addicted to all this intimate, private information of law-abiding citizens, the government could no longer get its fix just every 10 years, as required by the Constitution to maintain congressional districts of equal populations.
So, these sicko data voyeurs turned it into a never-ending annual habit — forever snooping, demanding, collecting and massaging data. And then forever slapping down the nation’s hard workers and taking their earnings to give away to those they deem to be the losers who cannot be winners without the “helping hand” of the federal government.
Like all Orwellian schemes, this diabolical obsession comes with a harmless-sounding name — American Community Survey — as if it is nothing more than the local Girl Scout troop stopping by to offer you little boxes of sweet, crunchy goodness — all for a good cause!
The feds want to know exactly who you are and the color of your skin.
“Race is key to implementing any number of federal laws and is a critical factor in the basic research behind numerous policies,” the Census Bureau explains, without a hint of irony. “Race data are required by federal programs promoting equal employment opportunity and are needed to assess racial disparities.”
Yes, Martin Luther King Jr. is scratching his head on that one.
And they want to know your “relationships” with all the people in your house. And they want to know of any “disabilities” and — ominously — what time you leave for and return from work everyday.
These creepos even want to know how many bedrooms you have and all about your plumbing and even your “fertility.” Related to the “virginity test” now popular in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood, the federal fertility probe is crucial, they tell us, as “a basic planning tool for agencies of the government.” What?
Forget data addiction, these people should be forced to register as sex offenders.
And, of course, they want to know exactly how much you are making, including wages, tips and even that loan you got from your grandmother. Why?
In other words, they need the information to determine the winners
and losers so that government bureaucrats thousands of miles away can pick new winners and losers.After staging a rare, genuine filibuster on the Senate floor, Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, last week introduced Senate Bill 530 to remove the criminal penalty for those who refuse to take part in this annual federal creep-fest that is not even required by the Constitution. You can add this legislation to the growing nationwide mantra of “Stand with Rand.”
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