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Sounds like this would make for a great movie script.

municipal internet

We could all pressure our local governments to provide municipal internet. Many cities have already created services that are much faster too.

This makes me wonder if a bank could operate with Bitcoins. Not everyone would withdraw the money at once and there would be a way of publicly verifying the degree that they're leveraged. If the bank wanted to lend out part or all of a person's money, it could require their approval such that both them and the bank get a percentage of the interest rate the borrower pays. So many questions.

That's certainly a possibility. The contrary may prove to be true as well. For example, if I was a terrorist and I knew that the NSA was spying on all my phone communications, I may elect to not use a phone. This means that I'm not as effective at communicating with other terrorists which may reduce the effect I have. You may very well be right though. It's unclear to me.

I don't think you're being very clear. The victims of terrorism generally don't have access to the information that these counterintelligence operations obtain. In other words, the victims are in the same place they were before they knew what the NSA was capable of. What I think you're saying is doublespeak. To paraphrase your argument, "Snowden is doing damage to our counterintelligence capabilities by releasing this information. Also, Snowden isn't doing any damage to the government." These statements contradict one another.

If the government offered a legitimate and effective way for whistleblowers to expose wrongdoing and unconstitutional behavior, perhaps they could limit this type of damage from being done. As it stands, the release of this information could be considered collateral damage as result of their continued persecution of whistleblowers.

There's another possibility. The NSA has blackmailed Obama into protecting their interests. If Obama makes substantial changes to the NSA and then is outed for something that the NSA would have known about, he may have been blackmailed.

If it takes approximately 10 minutes to confirm a transaction, it seems like you would be putting merchants at risk. Perhaps some sort of bitcoin insurance would mitigate this risk for a small monthly fee.

What's stopping another crypto currency such as Litecoin from superceding Bitcoin?

I'm curious about this too. Miners who maintain the blockchain will have to do more work for less bitcoins. If miners are earning less bitcoins, the value will have to continue increasing in order to encourage the miners to maintain the blockchain. At what point is this unsustainable?

On the legislative side, it seems that we need more transparency and the ability to curb abuses once detected. I don't really know what a working system that acts in this capacity would look like but I think it would include citizens as well as senators and congressmen. We don't really know what our government is doing and, although that might not have been an issue in the past, I feel that it's becoming an issue today as a result of everyone being spied on. If the government has nothing to fear, it has nothing to hide.

Galaxy S4 with Cyanogenmod is pretty awesome. The camera is much better and you can setup everything exactly as you want.

If we are justified in spying on foreigners, then foreigners are justified in spying on us. If foreign intelligence agencies have records of all the emails, phone calls, metadata, etc. of US citizens, what's to stop them from handing that information to the NSA and vice versa?

I'm curious to know what can be done to subvert this form of control both online and in the real world. Zersetzung sounds incredibly frightening and you're 100% correct that that's the direction we're going.

I notice that nobody has related this to the Swiss proposal to provide a basic income for all adults. If it works there, I wonder if other countries will move in that direction.

We also give third parties the content of our calls as well. Under the third party doctrine, it's then legal for the government to listen to the content of our calls. The reason they claim they don't collect all the content of our calls is that they know people would be up in arms. But it's perfectly legal for them to do so according to the third party doctrine.

I've been meaning to setup BTSync on all my devices, including the raspberry pi I haven't hacked with in awhile.

I would say the focus is more on the offenders' enlightened self interest. Not everyone is aware of the best course of action given a situation. That goes for both offenders and the people who have decided to perpetuate our punitive prison system.

I somewhat agree. However, it's incredibly dangerous for everyone to give up privacy while the government continues doing things secretly. If we all must be forced to be exposed, so should the government.

If you don't like the conversation then leave.

The Zimmerman trial isn't something that affects everyone's day-to-day life, but the media chose to focus on it. Imagine what would happen if the media had instead focused on the NSA scandal. If that were to happen, things would change very quickly.

Organize ourselves. The people need a way to influence the government more. We can do this through collecting money for specific causes and deciding, as a group, how best to influence politics, be it through billboard advertisements that shame particular representatives into acting in the interests of their constituents or by funding lobbyists to meet with congressmen etc. We need better tools to act as groups.

There are two ways to prevent terrorism. You can a) focus on preventing the actual act and b) focus on preventing people from becoming motivated enough to commit the act. If we truly want to prevent terrorism, we need to focus on both. Currently, we only focus on the first. My point is, there are other ways of preventing terrorism than by eroding our freedoms and tracking everything everyone does.

That's why broad, not specific, goals would be decided by large groups. One broad goal might be to "end domestic NSA surveillance". Specific actions could be decided by teams of people in working groups which is similar to the way actionable decisions are made in many businesses.

I'm currently working on a social network that helps groups of people make decisions and build consensus. In most organizations, decisions are made from the top down and then implemented by small groups within the organization. The goal will be to enable large groups to make decisions involving broad-based goals and provide a mechanism to form working groups to carryout the actions necessary to implement those goals. What does HN think?

Indeed. I can't believe more people don't know about this.

Could you list some things they do to protect us so that we all have a better understanding?

I feel that their aim would be to collect non-domestic information that could be used to push US interests. Is that really a positive thing?

If you haven't seen the video of the House judiciary committee meeting: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/314032-1

What would be a good alternative?