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Living Room / Uncommon snapshots of home
« Last post by IainB on July 31, 2013, 10:33 PM »Uncommon snapshots of home: here.
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...1. What's scrapbook?..."Scrapbook" is an incredibly useful Firefox add-on used for capturing web pages in their entirety, or selected parts of them, or several nested webpages - including embedded files (as required). It has a built-in search/index. I think it is probably unique.-wraith808 (July 31, 2013, 02:52 PM)
Sounding the alarm: Ars speaks with vocal NSA critic Sen. Ron Wyden
The senator talks about the NSA, the FISC, and more.
by Joe Mullin - Jul 31, 2013 1:20 pm UTC
As a series of top-secret NSA documents have been leaked over the past several weeks, the issue of widespread government surveillance has been front-and-center in the public eye. For some, those documents were shocking revelations; for privacy activists and digerati who have followed cases like Jewel v. NSA, they were less surprising than they were useful. The documents leaked by a former NSA contractor offered solid confirmation of what had long been suspected—that the NSA had created a giant information vacuum, sucking up all manner of data.
Another group that couldn't have been surprised: politicians in Congress' top intelligence committees. But few had complained publicly about overbroad surveillance. Two exceptions are Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), both of whom sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"I want to deliver a warning this afternoon," Wyden said in 2011. "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry."
Two years later, in small but noticeable ways, that anger is coming to the fore. Recent polls show that more Americans see the government as going too far in restricting civil liberties. A shift is clearly happening in Congress, as well. Last week, the House of Representatives was just eight votes away from de-funding the NSA telephone program.
Last week, Ars spoke to Wyden about his longstanding critique of NSA surveillance, what has happened since the leaks began, and views of the leaker Edward Snowden himself.
Ars Technica: In the past two months, much has been revealed about what kind of surveillance the NSA is doing, largely because of leaked documents. Is there more we don't know, that we should know? And can you characterize what we don't know in any way?
Senator Ron Wyden: There is a lot more to know, particularly in terms of getting a declassified version of the legal analysis used by the FISA court. When people get that, and see it in the context of the bulk phone records program, they will see how astoundingly broad it is. We've got secret law, authorizing secret surveillance, being interpreted by a largely secret court.
The administration's legal rationale talks about something that sounds like there's a connection to terrorism. Instead, it's morphed into an arrangement where, for millions of law-abiding Americans, the government knows who they called, when they called, and where they called from. It's a treasure trove of human relationship data. In my view, that reveals so much about the lives of law-abiding Americans.
Ars: In your last speech you mentioned location a few times. Do Americans need to be worried that their location is being tracked right now?
Sen. Wyden: The government says they have the authority to do it. I can't get into anything beyond that. They have said they're not doing it today.
In public session, I have particularly pressed the intelligence community to describe what legal rights are of law-abiding Americans with regard to whether or not they can be tracked. We have 24/7 tracking devices in our pockets. I asked the head of the FBI: given that the law is unsettled with regard to protection, I'd like to have you describe here in an open setting, what are the rights of Americans today as the courts are settling this? They have been unwilling on repeated occasions to give an answer.
Ars: Why have you been one of the only members of Congress speaking out about this?
Sen. Wyden: Well, I think there have been remarkable developments in the last eight weeks. Before that, you wouldn't have had this issue debated on the floor of the House—and you wouldn't have had by a mile more than 200 members of the US Congress saying, look, we've got real problems with the status quo. I consider that huge, huge progress in our fight to show that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive.
In the Senate, more than a quarter of the US Senate has sent a very tough letter to General Clapper speaking to exactly how the intelligence community justifies the bulk phone records collection on hundreds of millions of Americans. One of the concerns we feel most strongly about is that the intel community has not been willing to show how bulk phone record collection provides unique value that they can't obtain through emergency authorities and the court order process.
Ars: What changed the minds of your fellow members?
Sen. Wyden: Members of Congress went home. In senior citizen centers, company lunchrooms, and all kinds of places where the public gathers, citizens are coming up to their legislators and saying, 'Hey—what's this deal with all this business about the government collecting my phone records? I didn't do anything wrong.'
I don't necessarily have to run hither and yon to get colleagues involved in these discussions. They are coming up to Senator [Mark] Udall and I, asking for more information, asking for staff briefings. The senators are getting asked about this when they go home. Political change doesn't start in Washington and trickle down; it's bottoms-up.
This has given us a huge, huge wave of momentum. I never conceived of the day when people would come up to me at the barber shop and ask me about the FISA court.
Ars: What are the next steps that need to be taken?
Sen. Wyden: We'll be getting the information back from the intelligence community [in response to our inquiries] very soon. We'll bring it up behind closed doors, as well as in public, on the Senate floor. Senator Udall and I are going to make some additional remarks soon, particularly regarding the fact that the intelligence community has not just kept the US in the dark, they have actually misled the American people, actively. We're going to be walking the country through those issues.
And there will certainly be other votes, you can be certain of that, after Congress breaks for the summer.
Ars: Are there particular agencies or people that need to be called out, on that front?
Sen. Wyden: When General Keith Alexander said, "we don't hold any data on US citizens"—that is, I think, one of the most false statements ever made about domestic surveillance. This is an official who's been cleared, speaking in a public forum.
Ars: What about changes on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court? All the judges on it are appointed by one person, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Does that need to change?
Sen. Wyden: There is much about the FISA court that is anachronistic, and it needs to be updated. Their work back in the 1970s was garden variety stuff: they looked at government applications for wiretaps, and made judgments about probable cause. But 9/11 changed all of that. The FISA court [today] is a result of these take-your-breath away rulings—they said the Patriot Act could be used for bulk surveillance.
I know of no other judicial body that's so one-sided. The government lawyers lay out their arguments, and the court decides just on that.
Ars: It was Edward Snowden's leaks that brought this whole debate to the fore. Do you think at the end of the day, the leaks were a good thing?
Sen. Wyden: I have two statements on that. First, when there is criminal investigation underway, as there is here, I don't comment on the specifics of it.
But I do feel very strongly that the debate of the last eight weeks should have been started a long, long, long time ago by those who hold elected office, rather than by Edward Snowden.
Ars: Anything else you want to add?
Sen. Wyden: This is a unique time in our constitutional history. There's been a combination of dramatic changes in technology and sweeping decisions from the FISA court. If we don't take the opportunity to revise our surveillance laws now—to show that security and liberty can go hand in hand—all of us are going to regret it.
Ars: Thanks for talking to us.
Perhaps...but it still costs extra for a private room.Ah, there speaks the voice of experience, methinks.-Stoic Joker (July 30, 2013, 12:12 PM)
Does the NSA belong in the middle of that?Probably, yes, but since it was they that apparently are behind the making of the Infographic, they probably did not wish to draw attention to themselves like that. I think it's what's called "transparency and public information". ...-TaoPhoenix (July 30, 2013, 01:22 PM)
...Oh No Iain, for once triple-snark reverts back to the basics!...-TaoPhoenix (July 29, 2013, 10:30 PM)
Here's a short mockumentary film called "Political Earth". It's guaranteed to offend everyone on the left, everyone on the right, everyone in the center, and pretty much anyone that likes any kind of politics. In other words, IT'S AWESOME FUNNY AS HELL~!Silly-funny, but there's many a true word spoken in jest...
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=gx5WumJ4arQ-Renegade (July 29, 2013, 10:41 PM)
Well, I reinstalled HTTPS-Everywhere along with HTTPS Finder, (no rules for DC created), and I can still see the videos in the forum, still get the red exclamation mark against pages with partially encrypted contents.Maybe the URLs were being fetched from your history cache? I had to clear my cache to get rid of them and start afresh.
A question: Do you automatically load embedded video, (I don't automatically load any embedded media) ?-4wd (July 30, 2013, 07:32 AM)
...Wot u rote.Very well put.-Renegade (July 30, 2013, 08:15 AM)
...Now for something a bit more light-heartedThat is a super little film. Thanks for the link!
Fear of Flying - Short Film (Full Version)-Edvard (July 29, 2013, 09:26 PM)
No problem.Yeah, right.
I suspect that there is something peculiar to DCF in the way the square-bracketed YouTube fields are encoded in BB code. For example, if you put an http://... URL to YouTube in the field, it works fine, but if you put an https://... URL to YouTube in the field, it comes up with a BB code error.
...You may find it better to mark HTTPS Everywhere to not action youtube.com rather than DC.
...
...I used to use HTTPS Everywhere, (and the Greasemonkey alternative: HTTPS Please), but it caused more problems than it solved - easier to type https when I want it. ...-4wd (July 30, 2013, 03:23 AM)
HA! Iain! I was waiting for a second on my vote. Thank youOops, sorry. I had not been following this thread until recently, and in my haste I did not look over the previous page - if I had of done, I would have quoted your comment and added +1 to it. As it was, I unintentionally duplicated it.
Also a big fan of xplorer², when I'm on Windows that is...-Edvard (July 29, 2013, 09:54 PM)
I'm not sure whether the above type of process of elimination even can, or does necessarily achieve anything particularly useful. The conclusion is arguably a truism - that the act or habit of violence for the purposes of control over others leads to Totalitarianism (which manifests as deliberate, necessary and systemic violence for the purposes of control over others to oblige them to conform to a given set of rules).Technology is not the problem. Laws are not the problem. PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem....-40hz (July 20, 2013, 09:21 AM)
...Should we be surprised that when we base our entire society on force and violence, that things always end up as force and violence?-Renegade (July 20, 2013, 10:40 AM)
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