Remeber SOPA and PIPA?

Samt03 wrote:http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/06/nstic-government-internet-id/

I had issues getting to that url from another site so let me know if it doesn't work from here.

Pretty much the basis is everyone will have a id that can be used for any gov website, the other thing though is that id is issued to your computer/you log into it before you get online as it sounds, so log into your id once every site you go to is logged into automatically.  Sounds fun and all but it gives a great big open back door to the NSA and anyone else to track everything you do, and since it is 100% your id as you in they know what each person does online (can't hide behind proxy or saying someone else in your household did it.)

melodiccolor wrote:Not sure if that news story has credibility, as it doesn't state the source and I've seen not much else about it.  If it is true, it's a two edge sword;  it can prevent things like fraud and identity theft, but it can so easily be abused too, loss of rights in the same of safety.  Still, the lack of detail and just the claim makes me think this is a wait and see kind of thing.

On another matter, a broad grass roots coalition is working to restore rights:  New Movement Aims to ‘Reset the Net’ Against Mass Surveillance (link)

Zen wrote:

melodiccolor wrote:Not sure if that news story has credibility, as it doesn't state the source and I've seen not much else about it.  If it is true, it's a two edge sword;  it can prevent things like fraud and identity theft, but it can so easily be abused too, loss of rights in the same of safety.  Still, the lack of detail and just the claim makes me think this is a wait and see kind of thing.

On another matter, a broad grass roots coalition is working to restore rights:  New Movement Aims to ‘Reset the Net’ Against Mass Surveillance (link)

I'm not really sure that's gonna work because the people with the best spy tools are the host companies supporting your web features.
regardless if the NSA is hacking, they could still just get the information through purchase or whatever.

Zen wrote:

melodiccolor wrote:Not sure if that news story has credibility, as it doesn't state the source and I've seen not much else about it.  If it is true, it's a two edge sword;  it can prevent things like fraud and identity theft, but it can so easily be abused too, loss of rights in the same of safety.  Still, the lack of detail and just the claim makes me think this is a wait and see kind of thing.

On another matter, a broad grass roots coalition is working to restore rights:  New Movement Aims to ‘Reset the Net’ Against Mass Surveillance (link)

I'm not really sure that's gonna work because the people with the best spy tools are the host companies supporting your web features.
regardless if the NSA is hacking, they could still just get the information through purchase or whatever.

melodiccolor wrote:Congress Blocks the NSA From Meddling With Encryption Standards. Finally (link)

This will make the net much more secure as those who would hack company security and site security will have a much harder time.  The NSA had been working to weaken encryption standards so it could hack in whenever it wanted.  This made it easier for everyone else to too.

It'll take a lot more of this before I'll call it good.

melodiccolor wrote:No matter what Snowden says, he will be villianized by those who feel threatened by what he did.

This is a polarizing case where the full truth will remain unknown and each side will present the view favorable to themselves.  Still Snowden did us a favor and exposed a lot of abuse that our government really wanted to keep forever hidden.

It'll take a lot more of this before I'll call it good.

Indeed, but it is an important start.

Snowden wrote:It’s been one year.

Technology has been a liberating force in our lives. It allows us to create and share the experiences that make us human, effortlessly. But in secret, our very own government—one bound by the Constitution and its Bill of Rights—has reverse-engineered something beautiful into a tool of mass surveillance and oppression. The government right now can easily monitor whom you call, whom you associate with, what you read, what you buy, and where you go online and offline, and they do it to all of us, all the time.

Today, our most intimate private records are being indiscriminately seized in secret, without regard for whether we are actually suspected of wrongdoing. When these capabilities fall into the wrong hands, they can destroy the very freedoms that technology should be nurturing, not extinguishing. Surveillance, without regard to the rule of law or our basic human dignity, creates societies that fear free expression and dissent, the very values that make America strong.

In the long, dark shadow cast by the security state, a free society cannot thrive.

That’s why one year ago I brought evidence of these irresponsible activities to the public—to spark the very discussion the U.S. government didn’t want the American people to have. With every revelation, more and more light coursed through a National Security Agency that had grown too comfortable operating in the dark and without public consent. Soon incredible things began occurring that would have been unimaginable years ago. A federal judge in open court called an NSA mass surveillance program likely unconstitutional and “almost Orwellian.” Congress and President Obama have called for an end to the dragnet collection of the intimate details of our lives. Today legislation to begin rolling back the surveillance state is moving in Congress after more than a decade of impasse.

I am humbled by our collective successes so far. When the Guardian and The Washington Post began reporting on the NSA’s project to make privacy a thing of the past, I worried the risks I took to get the public the information it deserved would be met with collective indifference.

One year later, I realize that my fears were unwarranted.

Americans, like you, still believe the Constitution is the highest law of the land, which cannot be violated in secret in the name of a false security. Some say I’m a man without a country, but that’s not true. America has always been an ideal, and though I’m far away, I’ve never felt as connected to it as I do now, watching the necessary debate unfold as I hoped it would. America, after all, is always at our fingertips; that is the power of the Internet.

But now it’s time to keep the momentum for serious reform going so the conversation does not die prematurely.

Only then will we get the legislative reform that truly reins in the NSA and puts the government back in its constitutional place. Only then will we get the secure technologies we need to communicate without fear that silently in the background, our very own government is collecting, collating, and crunching the data that allows unelected bureaucrats to intrude into our most private spaces, analyzing our hopes and fears. Until then, every American who jealously guards their rights must do their best to engage in digital self-defense and proactively protect their electronic devices and communications. Every step we can take to secure ourselves from a government that no longer respects our privacy is a patriotic act.

We’ve come a long way, but there’s more to be done.


Edward J. Snowden, American

Future ambitions

That murky legal landscape hasn't stopped both ISPs and content industries from thriving. Yet it's also made room for one attempt after another at leveraging copyright law into for-profit Internet policing schemes. Rightscorp is merely the latest incarnation.

In the future, the company hopes to get more ISPs to comply—and it will expect more of those that are already cooperating, said Steele. Ultimately, Rightscorp is hoping for a scenario in which the repeat infringers it identifies aren't just notified by e-mail. Instead, Steele hopes to see those users re-directed to a Rightscorp notice right at the moment they open their Web browsers.

"You wouldn't be able to get around the re-direct page, and you'd have to pay a fine to return to browsing," he explained. The company is in discussions with four ISPs about imposing such a re-direct page, according to Steele. But the details about which ISPs cooperate with Rightscorp, and how much they cooperate, is a secret that the company guards closely.

The reality is, Rightscorp is a tiny company seeking to change the behavior of industry behemoths like Comcast and Verizon. And while it seeks to wield a "big stick" in the form of a potential copyright lawsuit, at the end of the day, it's the company's music industry customers who would have to take such a bold step.

...
Two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings—AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors—have deeply undercut these centuries-old public rights, by empowering businesses to avoid any threat of private lawsuits or class actions. The decisions culminate a thirty-year trend during which the judiciary, including initially some prominent liberal jurists, has moved to eliminate courts as a means for ordinary Americans to uphold their rights against companies. The result is a world where corporations can evade accountability and effectively skirt swaths of law, pushing their growing power over their consumers and employees past a tipping point.

To understand this new legal environment, consider, by contrast, what would have happened if Amazon had exposed its 215 million customer accounts to a security breach similar to Target’s. Since Amazon has taken advantage of the Court’s recent decisions, even Amazon users whose bank accounts were wiped clean as a direct result of the hack would not be able to take the company to court. “The lawsuits against Target would almost certainly not be possible against Amazon,” says Paul Bland, executive director of Public Justice. “It’s got its ‘vaccination against legal accountability’ here.”
...

The greatest damage here isn’t to us as individuals. “Mandatory arbitration is a basic threat to our democracy,” says Deepak Gupta, who argued the 2011 AT&T case before the Supreme Court. “This isn’t about us all getting our $30 checks when a company has ripped us off. It’s about laws that Congress passes being enforceable. The Supreme Court is allowing corporations to overturn law made by people we elect.”

Diverting all cases to arbitration also promotes a culture of impunity, enabling wrongdoers to more easily continue their wrongdoing. And when the threat of litigation is strong, it discourages corporations from engaging in misconduct in the first place. By contrast, says Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, “[t]he use of forced arbitration clauses has essentially immunized corporate America from any responsibility for its actions.” In the same way that the Justice Department’s decision to fine banks rather than prosecute executives encourages financial institutions to build in penalties as a cost of business, arbitration incentivizes companies to write down settlement awards as a routine cost, while perpetuating harms at large.

Public officials say they cannot fill the void created by the drop-off in private suits. “We cannot bring every case. No state has ever had or will have enough resources to supplant the role that private-action attorneys have,” said Brauch from the Iowa attorney general’s office. The proliferation of binding arbitration means that “state laws are basically being gutted,” he said.

By enabling companies to keep their wrongdoing secret, arbitration chokes off information vital to the public. Consider the long course of anti-tobacco company litigation and how it ultimately affected policy. Individual plaintiffs filed over 800 suits against tobacco companies between 1954 and 1994, bringing reams of internal documents into the public domain. Although the companies overwhelmingly prevailed in the private actions, the information the suits unsealed eventually emboldened forty-six states to file their own cases, culminating in a $206 billion settlement that also imposed sweeping changes across the industry.

If people harmed by tobacco companies had been forced to arbitrate their cases, there’s a good chance the public today wouldn’t know how tobacco companies maneuvered to make cigarettes more addictive and to hide their lethal health effects. More recently, details on how Bank of America, JP Morgan, and other financial institutions wrongfully seized people’s homes in the wake of the subprime mortgage bust also emerged out of a case brought by a private lawyer.

What will become of all this depends on whether Congress chooses to act. Last year Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Georgia Representative Hank Johnson reintroduced the Arbitration Fairness Act, which would prohibit mandatory arbitration in employment, consumer, civil rights, and antitrust disputes. Lawmakers have been floating a version of the bill for seven years. Even its supporters admit that—given the level of opposition from the Chamber of Commerce and other business interests—it is unlikely to pass anytime soon.

If Congress doesn’t act, though, core legislation that Americans have won through decades-long fights for a more just society—including minimum-wage laws, bans on racial discrimination, and checks on monopolies—is greatly imperiled. The outcome will go to the heart of whether laws function as a check on corporate power in an era where the weight and reach of that power have grown immensely. Unless we seize back our right to courts, these other rights will exist only in name.