On Thursday 01 July 2010 16:51:49 Nishit Dave wrote:
What do the informed Linuxers make of the Government threatening to clamp down on Blackberry, Skype, etc. again, unless they get a back door into the protocols?
Total crap.
Do you think it is primarily motivated by national security concerns, or by a desire to snoop on citizens?
Phishing xpeditions to enable shutting up uncomfortable people.
The fact is the SNR is so abysymally low (in such mass snooping) that you would require astounding numbers of people to filter content. Even if intelligent bots were harvesting such info. Not to mention that you would be unknownigly not monitoring real threats by people smart enough to stay below such surviellance. Reminds me of the stupid google maps ban.
Do we have enough safeguards to ensure that this government intrusion would not be a tool for political vendetta or corruption?
None.
And lastly, what can we do about it?
Comment.
There are several groups devoted to protecting conventional top down freedoms (freedom of press, judiciary, TV etc). However everyone of these are products of the current macopoltical setup and have agendas more or less in sync with the rulers. There are only a few who actually fight for individual freedoms, the EFF being one such.
Our cops' conviction rate is an astounding 14%. This with people motivated merely by personal gain. The detection rate is close to zero with terror strikes.
Just getting these slobs trained for better investigation would remove all threats.