Category: Blogs / Blogging

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Well, folks, they’ve finally done it. They’ve destroyed the Internet.

Everything us techies have been saying for years has been proven. We haven’t been paranoid at all, and our worst fears are true. The US government (with the collusion of the UK too) has been planting backdoors in software for years, and they can now decrypt virtually everything. You know those https links that you rely on for “security”? Bullshit.

Oh sure, it’s still running and everything. But this means that every email you ever read, every SMS message you ever wrote, every picture you sent privately, every purchase you made with your credit card — as well as your credit card information, your personal information, your Social Security number and all your private medical information — has been compromised. The NSA now has something on everyone, and if it’s true that the average American commits three felonies a day just by accident then they can blackmail or jail almost anyone they want with the information at their disposal.

All those people who claimed all these years with their big flapping mouths “Well, I have nothing to hide, so I don’t mind” are morally to blame for this too. I hope all their most private lives get blasted all over Facebook for their friends to giggle over and perfect strangers to scam and threaten them over. I’m sick of them.

Here’s the worst part, somewhat buried in this great article on the Guardian, and BTW I would like to nominate Glenn Greenwald for the Pulitzer Prize (and Edward Snowden for some sort of world prize as well):

The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the “price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace”.

What that means is that the US Government doesn’t actually believe in a free Internet at all. They only allow you to think you’re free because they have been secretly controlling it all along.

So, they’re no better than the Chinese government, which censors its citizens openly. In a way they’re worse, because they let you say whatever you want, and then they can come back later and make you pay for it.

No wonder Homeland Security wanted all those bullets.

Update: Bruce Schneier has said this more eloquently in many more words.

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As someone who has been observing the medical marijuana movement, I experienced a sort of “bong hit of irony” when I saw the headline “Obama Creates Jobs Program For Illegals” on the Drudge Report yesterday. It wasn’t just due to the fact that Obama’s administration has been running around closing and prosecuting well-run, state-legal medical marijuana facilities (after their explicit announcement to the contrary), but because of Obama’s often-repeated hand-wringing to the effect that he couldn’t personally change the status of marijuana, because that’s a job for Congress.

Well, Obama just did just that, by exercising “prosecutorial discretion” in an announcement that certain illegal immigrants would no longer be deported, but allowed to stay here and even work legally. Reason magazine reasonably asked Why can Obama bend the law for young immigrants, but not for drug users? To me, it’s not “drug users” that need protection, but legitimate medical patients who just happen to need cannabis for their particular illness. Do we demonize people who are unlucky enough to need opiates to kill their horrific pain?

So, President Obama, if you really want to help law-abiding Americans with jobs, why not do something to protect the hard-working, law-abiding Americans who happen to need legal medical cannabis to treat their conditions from losing their jobs, simply for testing positive for the harmless substance they already acknowledge to be taking? It’s not like anyone is deliberately contracting cancer, AIDS, depression, Multiple Sclerosis, PTSD, Crohn’s, etc. just so they can smoke a joint.