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“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”


Thursday, November 8, 2007

Yes, They ARE Watching You

Via Wired:

Former AT&T technician and wiretapping whistle-blower Mark Klein traveled to the nation's marble halls of power Wednesday, hoping to persuade lawmakers not to crush the lawsuit against AT&T that is largely based on his allegations that his former employer wiretapped the internet on behalf of the government.

[SNIP]

In January 2006, after the Los Angeles Times killed an article on his allegations after editors met with senior government officials, Klein walked into the Electronic Frontier Foundation and handed them a set of AT&T documents he took with him when he retired.

Those documents detail how AT&T diverted portions of fiber optic internet cables, -included powerful snooping hardware and a fat fiber connection out of the room.

The EFF filed those documents under seal with the court as part of their ongoing class action suit against AT&T.

NPR had a story on the testimony this morning; essentially, the claim is that AT&T has been collecting everything its users do on the internet--not terrorists, or suspects, but everyone. They know what you're looking at and they're making notes. They know the blogs you read and the porn you get off on. Yes, they know you're into midgets.

And no doubt it isn't just AT&T; they're only in the spotlight because a former employee is blowing the whistle. I know Comcast is watching what I do (I got a letter from them telling me so after I downloaded something that apparently broke the DCMA); and I'm sure Verizon is also.

A year ago, a friend of mine caught her boyfriend cheating. How? She found his chat messages, which were automatically collected and stored by their IM program (in this case, Trillium). While it's nice that she found out he was cheating, it's a little frightening to realize that yes, every piece of email, every IM, every webpage you visit is being recorded.

Are you a terrorist? Because apparently the government thinks we're all potentially terrorists.

Wired has been covering the AT&T scandal (and it is a scandal) pretty thouroughly. If you want to read more, check out the link to the story.

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posted by Mary, 9: 50 AM

Monday, November 5, 2007

Do You Remember
The Fifth of November?

From bellatrys came an examination of the Gunpowder Plot, Torture, and how history really just repeats itself. The piece is old, but she relinked to it, and it still stands. An excerpt:

It wasn't Fawkes who thought of it, moreover: this was far more than the half-assed "if we hit something that stands for the government, then The People will rise up and throw off their chains" idiocy of McVeigh and friends. The leaders of the plot were young British aristocrats, Robert Catesby, descended from one of Richard III's ministers ("The Cat") and Sir Everard Digby, who had been hopeful when James I was made king, and disillusioned when nothing changed for the better. Fawkes was crucial because of his experience undermining forts and dealing with large quantities of explosives in the Spanish army, but he wasn't the one with the inside and the political clout to form a new government with one of James' young daughters as figurehead, which was the plan. It didn't work, but the decline continued for another forty years.

The attitude that see, we need more repression, not less; less freedom of speech and religion, not more, people are trying to blow up the government, dammit! didn't exactly ensure security or a lasting peace for the country. A generation later, you got the Civil War, you got shifting alliances of socio-economic groups - irony of ironies, while the Gunpowder Plot was inspired in part by anti-Catholic policy, by the time that it was Cavaliers vs Roundheads, English Catholicism was on the government side, in a detente with the CoE against the religious radicals. (This sort of parallels the shift of some of the persecution-mentality Christian Militiamen sorts who were all black helicopters and guns when it was a Democratic presidency, but came around (not all) to believe that government was not after all the Great Satan, per se, when it was Bushco/Cheneyburton - "our sort of people, you know.") While Oliver Cromwell was the grandson of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's own Alberto Gonzales and a leading figure in the elevation of government power over religion private and personal, the whole catalyzing situation of the Oath which is at the center of A Man For All Seasons.

"if we hit something that stands for the government, then The People will rise up and throw off their chains" idiocy of McVeigh and friends. I should ask her if she's seen Children of Men, which questions the same thinking.

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posted by Mary, 12:00 PM