When it comes to a backhoe versus fiber, the backhoe always wins.
Jim Reese, from Steven Levy’s In The Plex
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Category: Quotations
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2012.12.4
… sacrifices often involve the rights and liberties of minorities and dissidents, so the costs aren’t born equally by all in society. When people say they’re willing to give up rights and liberties in the name of security, they’re often sacrificing the rights and liberties of others rather than their own.
Dan Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security
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2012.11.27
As Denham points out, though, the RCMP is not under her jurisdiction, so she can’t bring them into line. But the RCMP simply shouldn’t be running a surveillance system on people who haven’t broken any law, and they shouldn’t be able to take advantage of the federal-provincial jurisdictional split to do so either.
This means Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is going to have to school the Mounties on what privacy rights really mean, and why setting up a massive “just in case” database is not only a bad idea, it’s against the law.
Vincent Gogolek, “It Takes Two To Kill Illegal Police Licence Surveillance”
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2012.11.24
The issue here is not whether Anonymous activists can be rightfully prosecuted: acts of civil disobedience, by definition, are violations of the law designed to protest or create a cost for injustices. The issue is how selectively these cyber-attack laws are enforced: massive cyber-attacks aimed at a group critical of US policy (WikiLeaks) were either perpetrated by the US government or retroactively sanctioned by it, while relatively trivial, largely symbolic attacks in defense of the group were punished with the harshest possible application of law enforcement resources and threats of criminal punishment.
That the US government largely succeeded in using extra-legal and extra-judicial means to cripple an adverse journalistic outlet is a truly consequential episode: nobody, regardless of one’s views on WikiLeaks, should want any government to have that power. But the manifestly overzealous prosecutions of Anonymous activists, in stark contrast to the (at best) indifference to the attacks on WikiLeaks, makes all of that even worse. In line with its unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers generally, this is yet another case of the US government exploiting the force of law to entrench its own power and shield its actions from scrutiny.
Glenn Greenwald, “Prosecution of Anonymous activists highlights war for Internet control”
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2012.11.15
Iranian officials have been assuring the public that the establishment of the [National Information Network] NIN will not cut them off from the Internet. The NIN, according to the government, will provide a “faster, safer, and more reliable” network for domestic purposes, in addition to the global Internet for daily usage.
What the officials have been less vocal about is that the NIN will make it easier for them to monitor user activities and carry out surveillance. Moreover, the establishment of the NIN as an independent network from the Internet will provide officials with the option of cutting off access without affecting the country’s administration. Shutting down the Internet in the aftermath of the contested 2009 elections, for example, was problematic since it interrupted banking and government operations. With the establishment of the NIN, a similar outage will not interrupt internal network traffic.
asl19, “Iran’s National Information Network”
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2012.11.14
But first and foremost, Canada must get its own house in order. Thailand wasn’t the only country requesting that Google remove content; Ottawa did as well. What is most notable, and troubling, about Canada’s takedown requests is that an increasing number were not accompanied by a court order, but rather fell into Google’s category of “other” requests from the “executive, police, etc”.
This demonstrates that the government increasingly is bypassing formal and lawful processes in their attempts to get the compliance of private sector companies in their Internet censorship activities. Meanwhile, the government continues to resurrect Bill C30, despite widespread condemnation. The proposed electronic surveillance law would give the government unprecedented access to Canadians’ private online information without the requirement of a warrant.
If the Canadian government fails to respect freedom of expression, the right to privacy, and the rule of law in our own country, how can it expect other countries to do so in theirs?
Kieran Bergmann, “Throttling free speech, at home and abroad”
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2012.11.9
People in Azerbaijan live in fear. We fear for our lives, we fear for our jobs, we fear for the lives and jobs of our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, we fear for our friends. We fear every time when someone close to us dares to disagree with you. We also pay a high price when we dare not to fear.
Before 2009 I had criticized you mostly online. Then I was attacked in the centre of Baku. I was arrested and later sentenced in a show trial on fake charges of hooliganism. My father died while I was in jail, his health was deteriorating since the day of my arrest. I could not be there when he was placed in hospital and I was not there the day I lost him. Some of my relatives and friends lost their jobs. They were told that they are too close to “the enemy of the state”. Now, many people I knew are afraid to communicate with me online and offline and I can understand them.
In our interconnected world, civil society, states and businesses from across the world must work together to thrive in our global information society. This is the meaning and the spirit of this Internet Governance Forum. Internet governance can’t properly serve sustainable human, economic and social development without freedom of expression, the rule of law and efficient democratic governance.
Emin Milli, writing as Azerbaijan hosts the Internet Governance Forum
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2012.10.30
It’s very complicated. It’s very cumbersome. There’s a lot of numbers involved with it.
Gov. Nikki Haley’s reason for why social security numbers stolen by a hacker weren’t encrypted
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2012.8.13
Whenever we feel the urge to say “human values” or “social values,” perhaps we should immediately substitute a phrase closer to our intended meaning. If we mean “motives,” then let’s talk about them. If we mean “consumer preferences,” then say so. If we mean “the norms of a particular group in society,” then talk about those. If we mean “general moral principles that ought to guide our action,” then explore, define, and defend those principles. What we will find, I believe, is that these more specific topics are an improvement over the vague label, and that once we’ve begun using them, the word “values” can never again substitute meaningfully for more substantial terms and questions.
Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor
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2012.7.30
You hereby grant Ninja Tel permission to listen to, read, view and/or record any and all communications sent via the network to which you are a party,“ one section stated. “Before you get all upset about this, you already know full well that AT&T does this for the NSA. You understand that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy as to any on the Ninja Tel network. You grant Ninja Tel a worldwide, perpetual, assignable, royalty-free license to use any and all recorded or real-time communications sent via the Ninja Tel network to which you are a party. Don’t worry, most of this is for the lulz.
Ninja Tel Terms of Service (read more at Ars)
Excited Pixels 