Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

And thus, the Government became a listening party to every data transmission that will ever exist for the next thousand years. Voice, video, conversation. The talk with your kids. Everything. We need to do something about this. The internet is the future data transfer medium. It's the substrate we will be using to think among ourselves. Our government is trying to get inside our MINDS. By becoming our mind before the neurons have a chance to join up.

I'm just doing a little startup with me and my friends, I'd like to have a website, or broadcast to everyone around the world, but I can't afford to broadcast information to all the people like the big fat-cats who have paid off the government can.

This is step 1 of 10 in turning the Global internet in a controlled apendage of the american government, to be metered, spliced, diced, fast-laned, slow-laned and policed. There will be "pay me money to use this part of the internet" signs everywhere. And the taxes will be reasonable, at first.

The government will own the internet, and you will have to pay them dearly to use it. Even when the internet is simply a data transfer between two consenting adults that stand next to eachother.

The government then took a large step to becoming a God, omnipresent. Privacy? Out the fucking window. Kthx

Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for the government-industrial complex to clamp down on the open internet, and even this is weak compared to the possibility space (internet driver's licenses, etc), though it's obviously a "boiling frog" situation.

But it was, and is, inevitable that this clash happens. Democracy is not achieved and then chiseled into stone permanently; it must continually be earned and fought for by real humans, every damn day.

In this case, that means getting regular people on board with encrypted communication. Yes, it's an uphill battle, but we all got our friends and family to migrate from IE to Firefox. Now it's time to get them on PGP email, VPNs, etc. As geeks, we need to be educating users, creating one-click auto-privacy tools, and doing whatever else we can as Binary Minutemen to maintain a balance of power against threats to open communication.

Unless I've missed something important, please help me out in making the connection between the strategy of monitoring torrents to "Government became a listening party to every data transmission."

I've been doing what I can, but so far I've discovered no significantly new monitoring techniques that are being introduced.

I can't remember where I read it (There were links I remember from 2 different places, one post was on HN about this but it was all hear say and rumors to grain of salt) that they want or are building a system like Watson to monitor internet traffic because currently they have so much information that its impossible to sift though it all.

Couldn't find it with a google, can't really remember any good key words, so the site may have been a bad source (probably) I don't remember. What I do remember about the article is how it was mentioned that it was a revival of a plan they tried to implement back after September 11, but the plan was leaked and there was enough public out rage the US congress squashed the plan. THAT I remember had reputable sources, I remember checking that out on google. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the project to get you an article.

Maybe someone who knows what I'm talking about (mainly the later) could link it?

Anyway we won't know what if anything extra they're doing until someone leaves and blabs about it in 20-30 years time.

While I wasn't sure how true that was, I did throw it in the realm of possibility because it sounded feasible.

But I wouldn't blame anyone for considering this more hear say and rumors. :)

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