This is a back-of-the envelope, rather than a serious analysis, but perhaps it gives some idea of the scale?
401 karma · joined March 23, 2013
blog : quantblog.wordpress.com
That would be enough to store a few years of everyones life in considerable detail : videos, photos, phone audio, GPS, financials, dna, web surfing, ...
You would probably need to take the complete visual and audio stream that went into a persons eyes and ears over the course of a year of their life, to start to fill that up, and do that for every living person.
I just wonder how much of that data they really need to sift through, in order to find likely terrorists ?
This is a big part of the problem, the massive .mil budgets go to commercial contractors, who in turn support party candidates by donation. Its an incestuous positive feedback loop.
see Lessigs video talk on "LesterLand".
Such is the projection of American military power that his credit card and bank account will already be locked down, on grounds that he is a 'terrorist', regardless of which country he flees to.
If the Government trusted the NSA with our every phone call and email, why should we trust the Government?
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Whether they have real information is a seperate issue, who knows, they may have.
I dont know if there was a video, what it showed, how many people died, how many were combatants, what their ages were.
If I was a soldier.. Id want to know that these things are investigated well.. because I really don't want to kill innocent people by mistake. Where did the mistake happen along the chain of intel and of command, who didn't double check, was someone gung-ho or negligent ?
I don't think that would happen without someone leaking.
I know that even the most justified war is ugly : there are accidents and mistakes and innocent people die at times, despite the best precautions.
Im aware that the freedoms I have every day, are a result of a coalition of democratic countries winning WWII and other conflicts. Many of my freedoms were won by American strength : military, economic and technological. I'm not an American, but I hold up the Constitution, the rule of Law and Democracy as high ideals - the best way humans have come up with so far of coexisting on this planet.
But a Democracy cannot exist where there is no free speech nor the right to question the government and the law. Citizens need information on whats happening : we need freedom to speak and anonymity to discuss in private, if we are to have a functioning Democracy.
I think Bradley Manning had a moral obligation as a soldier and as a citizen, to release the information he did. From what I read it seems that he was careful not to share information that would get other soldiers and spies killed, nor give the enemy any material advantage in the war.
What I think should happen is that this should be a civil trial by jury to decide whether he acted legally and morally. He leaked news of military 'mistakes', so he should not be tried by that same organization. A civil jury should decide whether the obligation to uphold the Constitution, by leaking, outweighed his obligation as a soldier to keep the information secret.
Even more worrying here is that the Obama administration is pushing for this to be tried as 'giving information directly to the enemy' ie. treason, when clearly the motivation was not that.
If there were no Wikileaks, no Press, no privacy.. how would we keep our secret organisations in check, and have any confidence they are following their mandate ?
Nice vertical javascript timeline on Surveillance.
Id be very interested to see a compiled / aggregated list of sentencing for hacker and whistle-blower related prosecutions... I think we'd see a sadly consistent picture, which would help get the word out to non-geeks.
http://wikileaks.org/Assange-Statement-on-the-First-Day.html
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/as-bradl...
Google could have used their platform to campaign for better laws : a 'free speech + question mark' logo on their home page outlining their concerns would have been consistent with 'Dont be Evil'.. but they didn't even do that.
A not-just-non-evil-but-actively-good Google should have said to the Government : "No, you may not have any access to our customers data - you need to physically raid our buildings with a warrant to prise that from our stewardship. You need to hold us as a company in contempt of court."
How much better is the US than China ? : how can there be a democracy without both free speech and a right to private conversation ?
common practice in science papers, which is weird as the citations invariably have date.
tl;dr : massive surveillance is real, there is far more, blow the whistle if you can, take precautions
What would be the most effective form of protest?
Examples :
Everyone call random phone number on their mobile phones at exactly the same time "Hi, Im your friendly geek, just wanted you to know this conversation is being monitored"
Everyone use TOR for one week.
Everyone tweet "You are being spied on by the US government" at the same time ?
Basically the protest needs to drive home the massive swell of opposition on the issue - so that both sides of the house see it as a political survival necessity to reduce state sponsored surveillance.
that would be kind of useful.
If I could share that with my cabal, and use the clicks or upvotes to optimize the stream, that would be nice.
hmm..
Did you make a tool to construct these? ie to place elements by dragging with the mouse rather than trial and error.
I use both heavy SVG apps with a lot of javascript, and also small svgs for icons etc.
cool demos, had no idea you could do that, and its obvious once you rollover, which is a nice trick!
I see this as a clever hack.
[ Also more amenable to editing tools ]