Government snooping, backdoors and #necessaryhashtags

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by xilman

What is your Facebook ID?

I wonder how many eyebrows would be raised by "I don't remember; haven't used it in years. I can give you my MersenneForum ID."?

[kladner]

Originally Posted by chalsall

I wonder how many eyebrows would be raised by "I don't remember; haven't used it in years. I can give you my MersenneForum ID."?

Facebook: I didn't inhale, and I didn't like it. I would have to ask Firefox about the ID or password, if even it remembers at this distance. I used my account for a week or two, then inactivated it, which is one step removed from outright cancellation.

[LaurV]

Ha! I guess I am the oddest here, with "never had and never will have a fb account" (lowercase is intentional).

[only_human]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Ha! I guess I am the oddest here, with "never had and never will have a fb account" (lowercase is intentional).

I created a Facebook account but never used it. My Twitter account was used merely once to say something snarky about Sarah Palin. My twitter name is a one character long. really.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by only_human

My twitter name is a one character long. really.

Whoa! I guess you can sell it for a lot of money then? hehe...
For other sites and online games where I used to activate in my youth () all good and short names were taken, and peoplenerds would pay real money to get one. I usually ended up with 8-10 letter names, even longer when the sites won't accept numbers and would title-case automatically, etc (common practice to avoid names like biGRuNner or c23x%_#Pq, only small letters allowed and the first is automatically capitalized).

[only_human]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Whoa! I guess you can sell it for a lot of money then? hehe...
For other sites and online games where I used to activate in my youth () all good and short names were taken, and peoplenerds would pay real money to get one. I usually ended up with 8-10 letter names, even longer when the sites won't accept numbers and would title-case automatically, etc (common practice to avoid names like biGRuNner or c23x%_#Pq, only small letters allowed and the first is automatically capitalized).

I think if I actually use the account actively it may get shut down because the particular single character can't be typed on most systems. It is the highest value in a seven bit ASCII table, 127₁₀.

[ewmayer]

https://theintercept.com/2016/06/28/...ing-to-listen/
http://www.csoonline.com/article/309...-watching.html
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk...-civilian-data

[ewmayer]

Robert X. Cringely (a well-known pseudonym) has a 2-part series on Big Data:

I, Cringely Thinking about Big Data - Part One

I, Cringely Thinking about Big Data - Part Two

Part 2 - with which my one major quibble is no mention of the government's key early role in supporting startup-phase Google - has a hilarious snip illustrating the craziness of the DotCom bubble - did the folks throwing this pile of money around not contain even one person with an engineering background who understood the most basic rudiments of signal processing, by which I mean "orders of magnitude too many bytes for the datapipe"?

The result of all this irrational exuberance was a renaissance of ideas, most of which couldn’t possibly work at the time. Broadcast.com, for example, purported to send TV over dial-up Internet connections to huge audiences. It didn’t actually work, yet Yahoo still bought Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in 1999 making Mark Cuban the billionaire he is today.

And many people are still naive about how things work - e.g. 'Chris', who asks

Are you saying Amazon is tracking every mouse click on sites that are hosted on AWS? I’m pretty certain this is not correct. The AWS Customer Agreement states: “We will not access or use Your Content except as necessary to maintain or provide the Service Offerings, or as necessary to comply with the law or a binding order of a governmental body.”

Let's add a smidge of text highlighting in order to help Chris out:

Are you saying Amazon is tracking every mouse click on sites that are hosted on AWS? I’m pretty certain this is not correct. The AWS Customer Agreement states: “We will not access or use Your Content except as necessary to maintain or provide the Service Offerings, or as necessary to comply with the law or a binding order of a governmental body.”

A.k.a. "Amazon is tracking every mouse click on sites that are hosted on AWS."

[kladner]

https://theintercept.com/2016/09/01/...to-u-s-police/
Not just spying, but jamming and DOS against particular handsets.

A confidential, 120-page catalogue of spy equipment, originating from British defense firm Cobham and circulated to U.S. law enforcement, touts gear that can intercept wireless calls and text messages, locate people via their mobile phones, and jam cellular communications in a particular area.

The catalogue was obtained by The Intercept as part of a large trove of documents originating within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, where spokesperson Molly Best confirmed Cobham wares have been purchased but did not provide further information. The document provides a rare look at the wide range of electronic surveillance tactics used by police and militaries in the U.S. and abroad, offering equipment ranging from black boxes that can monitor an entire town’s cellular signals to microphones hidden in lighters and cameras hidden in trashcans. Markings date it to 2014.

[ewmayer]

The NSA’s British Base at the Heart of U.S. Targeted Killing | The Intercept

Internet Tracking Has Moved Beyond Cookies | FiveThirtyEight -- The EFF Panopticlick tool linked there is nifty.

[kladner]

The main drift here, is that the Post got a Pulitzer for some of Snowden's info dump, but they call for his hide all the same. Another point is that Snowden did not publicize anything. The Post, NYT, The Guardian, and The Intercept made those choices.

WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer) | The Intercept

Three of the four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them — implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

But not the Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU and Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page today not only argued in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — the paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” accept “a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”

In doing so, the Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S. media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own source — one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against the paper’s own source are the claims made to justify it.