marlinspire

According to Snowden and subsequent whistleblowers considerable resources are tasked to obsessing over political opponents , groups such as Occupy , anti-fracking and even competing business interests are targeted.

In Britain the Security Forces have long been seen as a bit too obsessed with lefties.

There is inneffective Security Theatre at airports - a political sop. What else is inneffective? Are there innefective secret things ?

I would like to see any journalist ask : Are the security services watching radical Islam enough or wasting their resources on what the electorate would consider the wrong targets ?

Will the Security Services having decryption keys to my communications make them more insecure to non-government agents ?

Will how secure the keys are be secret ?

What other governments , agencies and contractors will the keys to our communications be shared with ?

What oversight will there be ?

Neil Armstrong equates the moon and tv :

We could see that at the terminator, at the boundary between the black part of the moon and the lighted part of the moon. It was as if you were looking at a television set with the contrast turned to full contrast, very black and very white.

from http://youtu.be/PtdcdxvNI1o?t=1m30s Sky At Night BBC 1970 , Neil Armstrong & Patrick Moore

He is not wrong.

Comprehensible Examples from the news that show a trend of dangerous and inevitably technically incompetent control and surveillance.

Doctorow is a great speaker, well versed and full of citations and recognises that an educated populace and individual liberty are the true wealth of nations.

You might think such a seemless and high bandwidth delivery is well rehearsed but the same seemingly effortless intersections of facts and culture occurs spontaneously in the Q & A - as a speaker virtuosic.

The crypto wars, the copyright wars, the war for general purpose computing, chilling effects on vulnerability disclosure, drm, de-CSS - these define the limits of electronic possibility.

Freedom is being eroded by totalitarian feature creep - Doctorow is one of the few technological evangelists who realised this very early on.

"Recently Buzz had a hard time getting anyone at the White House to answer his calls about maybe doing a ceremony or something to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of his moon walk. (Eventually they pulled a little something together.) "

This, if true, is disgusting, a disgrace, nationally and globally.

He was threatened with 30 years so he took a plea-deal.

It is a shame he was denied a trial.

May or may not have been guilty - taking a plea under such extreme duress is hardly an admission of guilt.