Tag: News

Secret Service and ICE break the law with fake phone towers • The Register

Investigations ‘at risk’ from sloppy surveillance uncovered by audit probe

Source: Secret Service and ICE break the law with fake phone towers • The Register

Once again, the UK media is doing the job the US media won’t. This has been the case for several years now. Whatever truth-to-power legacy the likes of Ellsburg and Woodward and Bernstein laid down is utterly washed away now. I smell collusion between the US deep state and ALL US media companies now.

There’s a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo here about how the laws are written and interpreted, versus the departments following their own, internal guidelines. To me, it’s all the same as the situation with privacy laws, and all the privacy policies we click through and agree to every day. These kinds of laws are written to be exploited in specific ways, and designed to be completely obtuse, even to other lawyers. Even if you could somehow look inside these organizations, and prove that laws were being broken by either the government or some Fortune 100, it would take an army of elite lawyers and specialists to successfully litigate it. The end result is the same: “they” are going to do whatever they want, regardless of the legalese they throw down on the desk.

Look no further than the continuing saga of Edward Snowden. He laid several smoking guns on the table, proving that the government knowingly broke their own laws, regarding several of our Constitutional rights. He’s still on the lamb, and Congress has done nothing to change the situation. So, this is nice and all, but, really, who cares? It’s clear nothing can be done about it, or anything like it.

Videos of people absolutely losing it are becoming really, really popular on sites like TikTok. What they show is a society in which a lot of people are at their breaking point at any given time. In my opinion, these kinds of stories — that we are absolutely powerless against a government that is actively, purposely violating the basic tenets of its charter — is a large factor in why everyone is so pissed off all the time.

Opinion: 50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong?

When my scientist colleagues and I invented the internet 50 years ago, we did not anticipate that its dark side would emerge with such ferocity — or that we would feel an urgent need to fix it.

Source: Opinion: 50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong?

When I saw the headline to the link, I said to myself, “You know what’s wrong with it. We all know what’s wrong with it.” To the surprise of no one — except, apparently, LA Times readers — the article concludes that financial incentives are to blame for making the web suck.

What made me click through to the article was the absolutely certainty that I would see the following, and the notion that I would capture the horrible, inescapable irony for posterity. To wit: On the site of one of the nation’s largest newspapers, over an article describing the ruination of the web by crass commercialization, capped with a complaint of the loss of privacy, there is a banner ad for subscribing, overlaid with a warning that you (effectively) surrender any notion of privacy, just by looking at the site.

Well done, all around.