“In China, unlike in our country, the highest level of crime is very, very high. You pay the ultimate price. So I appreciate that very much.”
You might think a billionaire would know something about economics. I guess he’s just going for that cop vote.
But somebody had to put this dog down. Oh and look at him cry poverty and persecution. Poor little guy. Now he doesn’t exist.
What a disgrace. A “referendum,” they call it. Sure.
And screw the NYT and their tone here. As though their agenda diverges one iota from that of the U.S. State Department on this or anything else.
“America is easily moved. It’s absurd.” – Benjamin Netanyahu
“The other way too.” – America
A well done breakdown. For a poll.
The word Tor comes from the acronym T-O-R which stands for The Onion Router. What the Onion Router–or Tor–does is it routes your internet traffic through multiple Tor nodes on its way to your destination. So, on the regular internet, what we call the clear web, if you go to a website address the browser sends a request directly to the server that hosts the website, and that server returns the page directly to you. What you end up with is that your ISP and the recipient both know your IP address and can potentially figure out your identity. With the Tor browser, when you go to a web address, your request gets routed through other Tor servers so that the destination server does not know your IP address or physically where your request originated.
Tor also allows people to host websites directly on the Tor network, and these sites end in .onion rather than .com or .org or the other ones with which most people are familiar. When you access an onion site, you have the added benefit of end-to-end encryption. Tor uses public key encryption which means that each node has both a public key and private key. Anything encrypted with one’s public key can ONLY be decrypted using their private key. Conversely, anything encrypted using their private key can ONLY be decrypted using their public key. So, when you go to a .onion site, the browser receives the public keys of each node between you and the end server that you are accessing. The request is then encrypted one after the other using each node’s public key, and then the request is sent off. Each server receives the request and uses their private key to decrypt the package and send it to the next node in the chain. As the request goes through each node the layers of encryption come off, much like removing the layers of an onion. The end server then receives the final request and decrypts it. Using this layered encryption ensures that each node along the way knows nothing about what they are sending. They only have an encrypted blob, and they only know whom they are sending it to next. So, they just decrypt their portion and pass it on.
Tor is not perfect. The Onion Router isn’t perfect, but it does something that is not possible on the clear web. With the clear web, all of our web traffic is out in the open, both our IP address and also the websites that we are visiting. The government collects this data en masse. With Tor, this kind of mass surveillance is impossible. If the government invests enough time and energy, they might be able to figure out who you are as you browse in Tor, but it would have to be a targeted investigation, and if they are individually targeting you, you probably already have more significant problems than the government knowing if you visit a particular onion site.
People often call privacy-minded networks like Tor the “dark web” as if it is something scary. However, what is scarier to me is an open network where everything you do can be watched and examined. Privacy isn’t scary; it’s just part of life. When you have a private conversation with somebody, do you call it a scary, dark conversation? No, it’s just a conversation! If you pay a neighbor kid with cash (which is relatively untraceable) for shoveling your walk, is it a scary dark transaction? No! Of course not!
We have been programmed from decades on the clear web to think that anything private and untraceable on the internet must be bad. However, rather than ask what might be theoretically bad let’s focus on what is actually bad. There is something far more scary and bad than Tor, and it is the government. The government are the ones stealing thousands of dollars from you each year. The government are the ones who make the purchasing of valuable goods and services expensive and complicated. The government are the ones making demands every day on your life, and if you refuse those demands, they will smash into your home, and either kill you or else kidnap you at gunpoint and lock you in a cage.
Let’s get our priorities straight and let’s fix our perspective. Freedom isn’t what is scary. What is scary are those who violently take our freedom away. Privacy is essential to freedom, which means that privacy-minded networks like Tor are essential to our freedom online.
Originally posted at: https://technoagorist.com/2
Techno-Agorist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjWlrSuf4b4eApnFX9o82BA
Techno-Agorist on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/techno-agorist/id1458773157
Techno-Agorist is a production of the MLGA Network. Find more great content at: https://mlganetwork.com
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
That’s right, crucifixion. Don’t worry though, they’d already cut his head off.
But hey you shut up because money and Israeli national strategy require this alliance, okay, chump?
Jennifer Lynch at the Electronic Frontier Foundation discusses the use by law enforcement of data stored in a Google database called Sensorvault. She also references a good New York Time article which shows specific uses of the data by police.
The data is collected by Google Apps and stored indefinitely in Sensorvault.
“The data Google is turning over to law enforcement is so precise that one deputy police chief said it “shows the whole pattern of life.” It’s collected even when people aren’t making calls or using apps, which means it can be even more detailed than data generated by cell towers.’
This technique is problematic for several reasons. First, unlike other methods of investigation used by the police, the police don’t start with an actual suspect or even a target device—they work backward from a location and time to identify a suspect. This makes it a fishing expedition—the very kind of search that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prevent. Searches like these—where the only information the police have is that a crime has occurred—are much more likely to implicate innocent people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every device owner in the area during the time at issue becomes a suspect—for no other reason than that they own a device that shares location information with Google.
As the Times article notes, this technique implicates innocent people and has a real impact on people’s lives. Even if you are later able to clear your name, if you spend any time at all in police custody, this could cost you your job, your car, and your ability to get back on your feet after the arrest. One man profiled in the Times article spent nearly a week in police custody and was having trouble recovering, even months after the arrest. He was arrested at work and subsequently lost his job. Due to the arrest, his car was impounded for investigation and later repossessed. These are the kinds of far-reaching consequences that can result from overly broad searches, so courts should subject geo-location warrants to far more scrutiny.
