@ traveler:
Circle Jerks, "Killing for Jesus"
You are correct, I can't see the video, but I infer this is some kind of comedic parody of the "Christian militancy" of the officer core of the US military. Anyway, thanks for the clarification.
@ dzz:
Re SOPA, the Washington Post has published a guest editorial strongly opposing it.
You know legislation msut be really, really, really bad when the range of opponents range from myself, Techdirt, EFF... through Google, Microsoft. The proponents? The big studios, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. You know something must be really, really bad for the 99% when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce supports it.
The Wikipedia article seems to have been bowdlerized, and unfortunately I do not have my source at hand, but if memory serves, in its early decades, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (founded in 1912) was known as the American Chamber of Commerce, and in the 1930s, it funneled money to the Nazi party, and editorialized in major U.S. newspapers about the virtues of Adolph Hitler (who had reduced unemployment to zero, reenergized manufacturing, and who was of course also plotting World War II and the worst genocide yet committed.) So did Morgan bank (now incorporated into Morgan-Stanley) and Henry Ford.
(Off topic but interesting: few if any Americans seem to recall either of these factual tidbits about the Roosevelt administration:
- the WPA was closely modeled on similar Nazi programmes; even its propaganda posters often closely resembled contemporaneous Nazi and Stalinist "artwork" glorifying the industrious worker.
- Roosevelt succeeded in taxing the rich at something like 91%, later 94%, on the first 0.1 million annually. Needless to say, the upper classes did not disappear from American life, nor did industrialists cease investing in the US, during the late 1930s and through World War II. After the war, the tax rate after the first 0.1 million annually was gradually reduced decade by decade; recently the U.S. congress was unable to pass something like an increase to 34% on income after the first 0.1 million annually.
As I keep saying, everyone should study American history, if only in order to laugh at the often astonishing ignorance of most Americans about their own history. But in fairness, this ignorance is due not to low intelligence but to the appallingly poor "history textbooks", or better say, propaganda screeds too boring even for a Stalinist schoolchild to try to actually read, which are used in virtually every American classroom. So we should not be too hard on the benighted American citizen; powerful forces have been hard at work for a century keeping him/her in ignorance of such interesting items as the fact that while--- Hollywood movies notwithstanding--- the former Soviet Union never literally invaded the USA, the USA literally invaded the Soviet Union. Secretly. That was one of Woodrow Wilson's nastier and all-too-thoroughly-forgotten failed initiatives. Among the voices trying to expose the secret invasion was Helen Keller, a cofounder of the ACLU. Keller is often held up to American students as an exemple of how "in America, anyone can do anything" [sic]. But if these students read her autobiography, they would find that she explicitly recognized that had her parents not been wealthy, they would not have been able to hire the gifted teacher who helped her overcome the handicap of being both deaf and blind. She herself said that in America, persons born poor have very limited opportunities for self-improvement. Schoolbook hagiographies omit to mention that in adulthood, Helen Keller became a "far left radical" who supported such alleged "dangers to American society" as trade unions, in an era when US presidents routinely called out the National Guard to assault strikers. And in another echo of modern "spinmastery", the very same newspaper editorialists who initially praised her remarkable resiliance in overcomuing such severe handicaps turned on her, with vicious references to her lack of sensory experience, when she turned radical. In short, if she were still alive, Helen Keller would not doubt be a vocal opponent of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and everything it stands for.)
Anyone spot the horrible irony in this lineup of opponents and proponents?
Oh well, frequent encounters with betrayals of trust is a well known feature of life as a political dissident.
@ Mr. James:
1. Every state is a surveillance state to some degree.
Should citizens in the "Western democracies" take that as a "valid excuse" [sic] for the fact that multinational corporations based in the USA, UK, France, Canada, etc., have been busy teaching the worst regimes in the world how to use their immmensely intrusive and dangerous (and expensive) universal population surveillance systems to suppress the desire of their citizens for self determination? Thus sowing the seeds of their own destruction? Even if you prefer stability to chaos, in the long run, it makes no sense to support the Surveillance State wherever it may be found.
I would also point out that by all measures, experts agree, the nation with the most extensive universal population surveillance system is not China but the USA. The UK and other close allies follow close behind, but are limited by their budgets. Many citizens of "Western democracies" might be surprised to learn that when statisticians tabulate policing by the numbers, certain nations stand out as having an unusually large percentage of the population who work as uniformed police officers, and even more important, an unusually large percentage of the population who work as private security guards. These countries include Zimbabwe, certain repressive Latin American and MENA countries... and the USA.
What do these countries have in common? A vast disparity in wealth between the top 1% and everyone else. A vast cadre of private security guards is apparently a reliable indicator of a highly stratified society in which a tiny minority holds all the power and wealth.
China is among the countries with the
smallest police force, per capita, and also has relatively few private security guards. That is actually one reason why internet crime flourishes in China (and ironically, also one reason why the Chinese government places particular emphasis upon extensive internet monitoring). Endemic corruption, particularly among local officials, also plays a major role, of course.
Some countries whose autocratic leaders deeply fear the increasingly plausible prospect of popular rebellion, such as Saudi Arabia (which has a large and growing population of poor people), actually have policies of hiring unemployed people to work as (poorly trained) private security guards, in an undisguised attempt to divide loyalties among the poorer sections of society (the subpopulation with the least to lose and the most to gain by risking rebellion). The same pattern is seen in some of the most unstable Latin American and Caribbean countries. This ought to suggest to Saudi authorities that such strategies do not promote stability in the long run.
Gosh, now I sound like Hillary Clinton, don't I? (Two of the four preceding paragraphs echo points U.S. diplomats have made in public or in private.)
2. Every person that publicly disagrees with his/her government's immoral/illegal/illogical doings is an "activist" nowadays according to said government and has an X-File buried somewhere for Mulder and Scully to dig up.
One of the major points I have been trying to make is that under the US model of the Surveillance State,
everyone has an extensive dossier. Remember "six degrees of freedom"? The US secret police have consistently stated for many years (which doesn't make it true, of course) that when they are "looking at" some citizen who has become a "target of interest", they routinely look at acquaintances of acquaintances of acquaintances of the target (that's four degrees). Everyone should think about how hard it is, no matter how "sheeplike" you yourself may think yourself to be, to not know anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone who knows a potential "target".
(And "target" is a rather ominous word in this context. I recall the "joke" of Aaron Barr that he hadn't yet located the "missile coordinates" of Anonymous sympathizers, a reference to the deadly drones manufactured by his previous employer, Northrup Grumman. And I point to the current furore in Germany over revelations that a veteran intelligence officers appears to have been involved in several murders committed by a neonazi group which was targeting persons simply because they were immigrants; see
Code: Select all
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=71388
Such abuses are the inevitable consequence when any nations permits, nay encourages, the untrammeled growth of a vast secret police establishment subject to no meaningful oversight by the civilian political authorities.)
3. I wonder if all the security measures taken by folks like the OP actually do more harm than good to an "activist"- it's like holding up a neon sign that says "I've got something to hide from the surveillance people".
people only switch on tor for specific activities
Not neccessarily. Many use Tor for almost all of their web browsing sessions.
tor is painfully slow
When was the last time you tried Tor? I have found that browsing with Tor "on" is no slower than with Tor "off". To be sure, I guess that one reason why many users report similar experiences is that Torified DNS lookup tends to be much faster (and, my unscientific data suggests, more trustworthy) than the painfully slow DNS lookup used by many ISPs.
@ go-linux:
And Tor on dialup? Knew better than to even try . . .
Well, I
have tried it, and in my experience, using Tor
enhances the speed of browsing with a dialup connection. Because then there is no packet transfer slowdown to cancel out the faster DNS lookup when using Tor.
@ nadir:
Dial-up does still exist?
Many users have political reasons for preferring to seek out ISPs which may provide only dial-up service, in preference to local ISPs which are too closely tied to the secret police. Long live dial-up!
The more people do it, the more hard it is to guess who does it to "hide" something, and who does it only cause it is common to do it.
Exactly. And in my opinion, anyone who doesn't think that hiding from Google, Comscore, and other spycos is not sufficient reason to use Tor routinely, probably simply doesn't know very much about what those companies are doing to unwary websurfers. I'd summarize the situation thus: at the dawn of the 21st century, in order simply to live it is neccesary not only to regularly draw breath and occasionally consume food, but also to surf the web. And an unavoidable consequence is that one must continually emit CO_2 and personal information. And the spycos are constantly working on ways to "monetize" that personal information, like birds pecking for bits of grain. ("Crow" is a slang term used by many spooks to describe their profession.) To the spycos, we are all simply prey items to be consumed for their own benefit. We may believe--- certainly we
ought to believe--- that if anyone should own our own lives, it is we ourselves. But the spycos rather literally are constantly stealing and selling our lives, our innermost thoughts. How stupid it would be if we all continue to let them get away with that without even attempting to put up a fight!