I'm not a criminal, I am a a pretty mundane guy actually, but of course we live in a society that every single one of us breaks some small law every day.
Which is why I stopped using Facebook.
I also stopped using Twitter to tweet. I still use it to follow news sources, I just don't actively tweet. I did that after the NYPD won a court case to see all the private messages you send on Twitter.
I also don't comment much at all on blogs, and social sites like this one or Reddit anymore. (I use to be a top 10 contributor over at Reddit. At least that is what some metric said a few years ago when someone listed the top ten most popular usernames. That account is deleted now)
I am slowly pulling out. I have a deep distrust of the current surveillance state in the United States. I remember reading a story about a guy who posted a quote from fight club on his Facebook status and a few hours later in the middle of the night the NYPD was busting in his door and he spent 3 years in legal limbo over it. (Might have been NJ police anyways, red flags)
You start piecing together these things, and you start to realize that your thoughts and ruminations about life, the universe, and the mundane, can be used against you at any moment and can completely strip you of your liberty and freedom, and any happiness you may have had.
I am gonna be completely honest, I am scared to express myself any longer on the Internet in any fashion. I don't trust it any longer. I don't trust the police, I don't trust the FBI, I don't trust the federal government, and I also don't trust, nor have faith, in the justice system in the United States.
I have never had a facebook account. Never have - never will.
I distrust everything they do. And while we like to think that other sites are not as bad, I was recently censored on Quora for asking about why a post was censored on Reddit.
They threw some "against policy" bullshit at me, and Marc Bodnick attempted to appear sympathetic and that his hands were tied and he didnt like the policy either - but it was a BS response.
They removed my question asking why the top LIBOR story on reddit was removed - I asked if Yishan Wong was directly responsible for such censorship etc...
After berating Marc for the BS excuse they stopped replying to me.
EVERY single thing you type online is viewed by the NSAs terrorbots.
Anyone that thinks anything is private online is fooling themselves.
Let's take it a step further: every item that you purchase with a credit card is recorded. It wouldn't surprise me if some retail stores use CCTV systems capable of facial recognition to identify cash purchases, too...
It's time to create an underground data haven in Kinakuta--the Crypt.
> EVERY single thing you type online is viewed by the NSAs terrorbots.
Evidence? Did you program these NSA bots or something?
> Anyone that thinks anything is private online is fooling themselves.
No, they just don't know any better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy If you want your messages to be heard by limited parties, make it so. "My friends are too stupid to know how to use any form of encryption" is not an excuse, and might cause you to pause and consider whether you want to share anything important with such friends in the first place.
Get a personal cert and you can use it natively in Apple Mail, not just for signing but also for encryption. We should be helping friends, family, and colleagues do this.
Encryption is great, as long as the people you don't want to hear it can't decrypt it. Given the NSA's recent moves to build up computing power, and the way Moore's law works, your encrypted communications today are fodder for review tomorrow.
Oh, certainly the NSA is monitoring a lot and trying to monitor more, but my pedantic side had to call out the "EVERY single thing". :) Thanks for the link though, I had forgotten the details of that case and only vaguely remember hearing about the Obama administration's move to dismiss it. (Which is funny, because presently a common criticism is that Obama keeps blaming his predecessor for everything wrong. He doesn't seem very keen on prosecution...)
It's easy to future-proof your encryption, even in the face of exponential increases in computing power. The biggest danger to encryption systems that rely on integer factoring (i.e. RSA) right now is feasible quantum computing, but there are schemes that don't rely on factoring so there's hope on that front. For the trivial stuff I bother encrypting, I'm more worried about, in increasing order, being given the choice of decrypting something or getting shot or sent to prison for life (fortunately we have some precedent in the US and elsewhere against this), being tortured for a while without knowing why before being asked to decrypt something, and being tortured without having any information but being unable to convince the torturer of that.
Thanks to HN Notify (http://hnnotify.com/) I know what your post said before you edited. :P Knowing that, I'm sure you're aware of all kinds of crazy NSA crap others aren't, so thanks for flashing your credentials; as I said in another comment, I was pretty much just being pedantic about the "EVERYTHING".
Not only small laws, in the eyes of the feds. I highly recommend reading Harvey Silverglate's (veteran of the EFF, ACLU and the FIRE) book "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent." He discusses the issues of vagueness in federal felony statutes.
Think about it this way, the efforts to convict Jeff Skilling (yes, of Enron) of "Honest Services Fraud" would make reading HN from work a federal felony. Note that after the book was published, the Supreme Court threw out Skilling's conviction for honest services fraud on the basis of vagueness. But many other issues remain.
For example, I design my billing cycles on the principle of minimizing invoices of greater than $10k. Is this a federal felony? By some interpretations, it might be. Part of the reason is I don't want lots of my payments from customers being reported to the federal government. Part of the reason is that larger numbers of smaller invoices make cash flow a little easier to manage. Part of it is that I have found that banks don't like seeing a lot of large transactions and therefore my life is easier vis a vis the banks if I keep those to a minimum. But I think such statutes will have to be read narrowly.
>I am gonna be completely honest, I am scared to express myself any longer on the Internet in any fashion. I don't trust it any longer. I don't trust the police, I don't trust the FBI, I don't trust the federal government, and I also don't trust, nor have faith, in the justice system in the United States.
The internet is for marketing yourself, not expressing yourself.
>I remember reading a story about a guy who posted a quote from fight club on his Facebook status and a few hours later in the middle of the night the NYPD was busting in his door and he spent 3 years in legal limbo over it.
I am not (yet) at that point, nevertheless I understand your concerns. The most problematic thing to those scared like us is in my option the emerge of sentence/word structure analyses that will make it possible to draw our online identities together even when different ips, email, user, etc are used. I would love to see something like http://www.linguee.com/ that would help to "neutralize" language in such a way, that it seeks/suggests replacements for unique elements of phrases/words/etc.
> I am gonna be completely honest, I am scared to express myself any longer on the Internet in any fashion. I don't trust it any longer. I don't trust the police, I don't trust the FBI, I don't trust the federal government, and I also don't trust, nor have faith, in the justice system in the United States.
I moved out of the country four years ago for this very reason. The rule of law is gone. It is unsafe to live there.
You must leave. The time is now. This is not a drill. You are not overreacting.
It's the textbook definition of ridiculous. The entire argument you just made is one big collection of fallacies.
I'm openly and viscerally critical of the government, politicians, etc etc etc on many social media outlets, phone calls, emails, other communications yet I have not been impacted in any way. I have not had any of my rights restricted, abridged, etc.
So either I'm the luckiest guy in the "police state", or you're overreacting.
No it's not a police-state where they are actively targeting dissidents.
It's a TSA-state where there is a massive over-reaction to bureaucratic automated scanning of communications.
Post some SMS/Tweet/facebook update with a quote that sounds to an automated script like a terrorist threat. (eg a line from Fightclub or a Clash lyric) and watch the reaction.
Even if the police bursting down your door manage to not accidentally shoot you - hopefully you are white and rich - expect to be dragged through the courts and have your life ruined because THEY can't be wrong.
So some automated system somewhere screws up on one person out of roughly 300 million, (approx 0.000000319% for those keeping score), and this justifies a flight from the country.
Allow me to be blunt. Your concerns are overstated.
Personally, I wish we could do a complete debugging of such problems, and see which options are available to fix them properly. Note the word "complete".
Read the declaration of independence. The bug is explain (suffering while evils are sufferable) and the debug procedure as well (altering or abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed)
>but of course we live in a society that every single one of us breaks some small law every day.
I never really understood this line. I can say with pretty much 100% certainty that I have broken no laws, no matter how small, at any time within the past week. Traffic, what have you.
It wasn't difficult either. You sacrifice a tiny bit of convenience, but honestly? It's worth it to have a clean conscience.
> I can say with pretty much 100% certainty that I have broken no laws, no matter how small, at any time within the past week.
I can say with pretty much 100% certainty that you're wrong (at least if you're in the US).
I'm not saying that you're lying, let alone that you're intentionally doing wrong. It's just that the web of law reaches everywhere and it's almost impossible to not trip over it.
IMHO most of these laws shouldn't exist but that's just me.
Which is why I stopped using Facebook.
I also stopped using Twitter to tweet. I still use it to follow news sources, I just don't actively tweet. I did that after the NYPD won a court case to see all the private messages you send on Twitter.
I also don't comment much at all on blogs, and social sites like this one or Reddit anymore. (I use to be a top 10 contributor over at Reddit. At least that is what some metric said a few years ago when someone listed the top ten most popular usernames. That account is deleted now)
I am slowly pulling out. I have a deep distrust of the current surveillance state in the United States. I remember reading a story about a guy who posted a quote from fight club on his Facebook status and a few hours later in the middle of the night the NYPD was busting in his door and he spent 3 years in legal limbo over it. (Might have been NJ police anyways, red flags)
You start piecing together these things, and you start to realize that your thoughts and ruminations about life, the universe, and the mundane, can be used against you at any moment and can completely strip you of your liberty and freedom, and any happiness you may have had.
I am gonna be completely honest, I am scared to express myself any longer on the Internet in any fashion. I don't trust it any longer. I don't trust the police, I don't trust the FBI, I don't trust the federal government, and I also don't trust, nor have faith, in the justice system in the United States.