Over the past year, the ACLU has really bent over backwards making itself the most ridiculous organization I ever once foolishly gave money to. Many of my readers are well aware of my immense admiration for Kade Crockford, the Director of the ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project, whose smearing, straw manning, feigned stupidity and ass-kissing over the past year on behalf of Dad’s monetized, subservient ‘whistle-blowing’ would be martyr-like in its unabashed self-abasement were it not for the enormous delight Crockford obviously takes in Crockford.
But it’s quite unfair to make too much of an example of any single ACLU clown when each of them routinely demonstrates that organization’s complete subservience to private power in their own entertaining way. So for your delectation, below is a screen cap of recent tweets from Christopher Soghoian, Principal Technologist of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, here doing the important work of defending Google Maps from a possible copyright violation by a freelance artist.
Seems Soghoian is somewhat vexed that the woman who curated, cropped and made art from Google Maps photos for a Wired Magazine feature got a photo credit for doing so. (more text below tweets)
Yeah, this may seem like something that would matter only to a particularly ridiculous paid Google flack — that is, a real asshole — but careful there, laypeople. Soghoian works for the ACLU, not Google. So his concern can only mean that this unauthorized use of Google intellectual property sets a dangerous precedent for us all, even the poorest and darkest of us! I mean, how would we like it if Google just took our shit and sold it to somebody?
The problem with a left as unprincipled and just plain stupid as the one the US is stuck with is there are so few people who have any fucking clue why oligarch-orbiting liberal-libertarian mutants like Crockford and Soghoian are so grimly and contemptibly amusing. They think highly paid professionals who spend whole days running interference for tech giants, billionaires and their lackeys are on ‘our side’ so long as they throw in some hype about the unique horror of one Federal agency or, in Crockford’s case, ostentatiously perform a laughably muddled radicalism in between exhorting followers to call their congress people. That it’s in-fighty for anyone with a fucking clue about how power works to suggest otherwise.
Tweet thread can be found here. For more of Soghoian’s brave work on behalf of poor, afflicted Google, be sure to see his quotes in this Forbes article from 2011, Google Hands Over User Data for 94% of U.S. Law Enforcement Requests. (h/t @jbjabroni10). Enjoy!
UPDATE 2
UPDATE
God, what a fucking tool.
https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/473915156770992128
Related
The Rancid Honeytrap 
I remember back in the day when the NSFW (now Pando) guys used to flog the Greenwald-CATO-Koch connection, Greenwald would always retort some variation of “what about the Koch-funded ACLU?” In retrospect maybe that wasn’t the strongest counter.
In broader terms, given the events of the last year do you feel like maybe the tactical alliance with libertarians might be running its course?
Yeah. Really starting to rethink all that. Might have to admit I was wrong.
yeah wow. They really put the Libertarian in Civil Libertarian.
And Take the civil out of …etc.
Basically they just suck every day in every way.
ACLU aside — and perhaps this is off-topic — but one of the most telling moments where libertarians’ intentions lie always come back to the election of 2010 with Russ Feingold. Now I’m not saying that Feingold was a left (he is a Democrat, after all). But Feingold was the only Senator who voted against the Patriot Act, and there wasn’t much of a rallying cry for him from libertarians. And then there’s Ron Johnson…arguably one of the farthest right wing Senators currently in office, who loves him some state power.
If it comes down to taxes and capital vs. civil liberties (which usually doesn’t include icky things like abortion), libertarians will inevitably choose the former, no question. Property rights are supreme, after all.
Regarding the topic at hand, how is this not considered “fair use”? As you said, she’s cropping the photos, and making art out of them; totally different from the satellite photos as “owned” by Google. Even if you support copyright, the first thing that jumps out at me wouldn’t be “Oh no help help, Google is being oppressed!” Tarzie you just keep finding stuff that punches me in the gut and makes me wanna give up totally lol.
I know, so trifling. And he doesn’t even work for Google. He works for the ACLU. It’s very revealing, I think. They’re bought and paid for. That or they just instinctively tilt toward power.
Speaking of tweets… I’ve been thinking of the one you wrote about the BI article on Cryptome. “It’s the same kind of hustle of the public where they pretend to be in opposition when they’re in cahoots”. I think this perfectly describes “The War on Drugs” and “The War on Terror”. Sorry to go O/T but that was such an astute observation I wanted to point it out.
For pseudo-conflicts, the ‘Wars’ on Terror and Drugs have certainly put quite a few people in graves and in jail.
http://louisproyect.org/2014/05/24/right-left-convergence-phooey/
Proyect at Unrepentant Marxist on left-right convergence.
As much as I think Proyect is completely useless since he falls into the North Star- cruise missile lib – hopeless Trot camp (is it even possible to fall into so many shitholes), he offered up some interesting and hilarious partnerships in this one (the “Unstoppable Right-Left Convergence Event on May 27”). And don’t miss the comments, where Greenbacks gets special mention.
Of course, Proyect gets Greenwald completely wrong. What the fuck is wrong with people? Richard Estes is the only person in that thread with any brains. It is indisputably correct to say that Greenwald embodies the left-right convergence, and all it’s hideous possibilities, in ways the Koches could have never imagined, and that he is very much on the right-wing side of this wondrous coalition.
The other thing that people seem to be missing is the extent to which this convergence is already a fait accompli in organizations like the ACLU and EFF and mutant creatures like Crockford and Soghoian. It’s one more angle to see in the Snowden Affair: the midwifery of this “convergence” into the mainstream. The fact is, it’s less a convergence than the remaking of libertarianism as left. Libertarians have had to cede nothing for this alliance while alleged lefts seem content to abandon everything to it, including old standbys like anti-capitalism.
I agree that the “left”/right mainstream convergence is fucking annoying/maddening especially in the US as it’s all just part and parcel of the Western elite’s deliberate crushing of every school of thought into complete meaninglessness. Obviously, the Democratic/Green Parties in the US are hilarious/sad “leftist” shams in the US but so are most of the political party variants in the EU – i.e, Greens, Marxists, Socialists, Stalinists – as all of them somehow are fully on board with neoliberal capitalism and all of it strictures/remedies. I don’t think people understood how far the TINA doctrine went when Thatcher et al rolled it out 30+ years ago. I believe that she wasn’t just talking about an unavoidable economic system as much as explaining to the world where it was headed socially/philosophically due to the imposition of said economic system: a state where all words/ideas lose their meaning and become nothing more than quaint interchangeable descriptors whose only value is how they could be used as marketing weapons to target certain consumer groups/segments of the population.
Aside: funny how nowadays one would be really hard-pressed to delineate the differences between the neoconservatives and the neoliberals, huh? How is the R2P doctrine different from PNAC? Seemed so clear 15 years ago, what with Darth Cheney and his black cape, right?
Yup, as the TPTB realized looong ago, although there are no real philosophical differences between rich/powerful elite fuckers it does helps to either 1) pretend that there are so as to keep the rabble interested/participating in the faux democratic confines of their Spectacular prison OR (and even better) 2) if at all possible mold/shape society so that the lack of elite philosophical differences is perfectly reflected in the society as a whole – i.e, TINA really writ/manifest large. This is what we’re seeing now and what you have so eloquently spoken to: the “convergencing” of the hoi polloi into a one homogeneous mass of beige idiocy: “leftist libertarians” and the like. Just as it’s somehow “correct” for a person such as Soghoian to defend massive corporations in the name of “leftist” principle and just as it’s “righteous” for someone to turn down a job at the NSA to work at Google on “principle” so too are younger generations conditioned to believe that their “freedom/liberty” will be secured and accessed through the continued offerings of ever more awesomer glimmerpads and online experiences by the very corporate entities that rule their existences. The inherent contradictions in each case barely merit a raised eyebrow nowadays.
Lastly, I do however go back and forth as to how much these people truly understand about their own idiocy/comprising? How much is just ignorance and how much is conscious “selling out”? Similar to the time-honored question of whether the elite are really brilliant evil geniuses or a bunch of plodding dunderheads (I say they are both at the same time (i.e., light-like) but that’s another story), I wonder how much people like Soghoian et al really comprehend about their seemingly obvious lack of understanding when it comes their attempts to the “square the circles” in their own actions/lives?
Sad.
Michael Kinsley was Mean to Me Watch: Day 11.
The Intercept –> watching fearless and adversarial paint dry
I just chalk it up to them not wanting to leave their liberalism behind. It’s comfortable and profitable for them. The left-right shit is still smoke-screeny to me. They all love them their capitalism, exploitation, violence, inequality, and profit. They have different ways of carrying it out but the goals are the same for all intents and purposes. This guy wants drones, this other guy doesn’t. That person wants reformism, this other person wants to dismantle the entire government or huge parts of it (like the Pauls). But with the same goals, no matter how you move the pieces around on the board. So shit stays the same for the working class and marginalized: wage slavery, police-on-oppressed crime, racism, prison-industrial state, aggressive imperialism, etc.
For these twitter people and columnists and ACLU, it comes down who is your audience? Who can you play to. Greenwald can’t play to the conservative wing of capital anymore, that anti-Chavista and pro-Bush crap isn’t going to play to his primary audience. I suspect he still believes that shit he just can’t say it anymore. He pushes no drones, no Obama, and fake anti-imperialism. That plays with the liberal wing, not the reactionary wing. Limbaugh plays to the reactionaries. The ACLU can shovel up the cruise missile libs and the even leftier people including the socialist and green wings.
Benefit from the system = don’t want it to change.
I must admit I have no idea what this means. In what universe are wanting drones, not wanting drones, reformism and dismantling the government “the same goals”? If you are saying that nothing really has changed in the political environment, that this left-right convergence that is actually a co-option of the left by the right via libertarianism, and that people like Greenwald, Crockford and Soighoian don’t represent something hideously new, I think you’re full of it.
As much as I think Proyect is completely useless since he falls into the North Star- cruise missile lib
—-
I imagine that this person considers me a “cruise liberal lib” because I documented how Gaddafi sought to strengthen ties to AFRICOM, cut deals with Berlusconi against the interests of Africans trying to find work in Europe, falsely accused nurses of infecting babies with HIV, etc. If you are too stupid and uninformed to answer my articles, naturally you will sling mud at me. This is a sure sign that your primary means of communication is a gravy-stained coloring book.
Louis —
I think GTI was suggesting that you are one of those radicals who from time to time makes common cause with imperialism for ‘humanitarian’ reasons. You have answered by making what seems to be a case for the assault on Libya, an intervention which most sane people regard as having created a complete disaster. If your intention was to disprove GTI’s point, you failed dismally. GTI comments quite a bit around here, so regular readers know that far from communicating with “a gravy-stained coloring book”, GTI communicates with a lot of wit and intelligence. I know you can do the same, Louis, but you laid an egg this time around. Thanks for dropping by, though. Feel free to drop by again.
You have answered by making what seems to be a case for the assault on Libya, an intervention which most sane people regard as having created a complete disaster.
—
Right, “what seems to be a case for assault”. That’s what Obama needed, my calling attention to nurses being falsely accused of infecting babies with HIV. You really are a twisted fuck.
Your logic eludes me, so it’s a shame your insults aren’t at least entertaining.
I read you infrequently, so I have no idea what your position on the intervention in Libya is, but I also truly don’t care. GTI made an offhand remark that was overtalked after your first comment.
Perhaps you’d like to find the intersection between the left-right convergence of your recent post and what a shit-pile the ACLU has become. You’ll be on-topic and possibly not tedious and everything will be peachy. Otherwise, let’s just end right here.
Breaking News! This Just in!
The system has finally met its match and his name is Christopher Soghoian!
Christopher Soghoian, Ph.D is the Courageous Principal Technologist (CPT) in the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project (SPTP) at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
In his own words, Soghoian has a “track record of speaking truth to power using their soapbox to point out their flaws….”……Yes, all you fierce, adversarial journalists over at The Intercept, eat your heart out….because Soghoian is in town!…..and Power will never be the same…..
Soghoian’s Targets: 1) The TSA 2) Firefox 3) Google 4) Spring Nextel 5) Telecoms 6) The Federal Government…
Soghoian: “People have a right to know what companies aren’t telling them.”
Power, still reeling from Soghian’s attacks, was too beaten down to respond….
Story developing…
http://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf_soghoian/
Wired? Do you know that Wired is such a Big Tech puppet, it deleted All the comments from its old posts, when it discovered – via myself – that they contained some early, pre-Snowden NSA warnings? Warnings they ignored. That is what happened. One minute, all the old posts were there with their comments, the next, all the comments were gone.
When I asked What was going on? finally David Kravets (who is now at Ars Technica) answered, said they’d all been deleted in a site update:
Luckily, I had taken a screen shot of one set of NSA warning comments from 2012. Of course, all the media is kowtowed and have the same gag on their mouths, they said nothing.
Next you’ll be telling me that Human Rights Watch is a propaganda arm of the US government.
Stop the hate, ingratiate!
Soghoian’s sad, stupid mission is a great example of tech exceptionalism. Somehow, I guess because tech is so shiny and cool and forward-thinking, it is treated *entirely* differently than analog analogues. (Heh.)
That is, can you imagine Soghoian getting all worked up over an artist using a page from a Rand-McNally atlas as the basis for a piece? I really can’t. Fair use and derivative works are fairly well-protected areas of IP. I’d think even someone at the ACLU would know that.
Sometimes the brave new world isn’t all that new. Sometimes the issues raised by tech have been addressed, and thoroughly so, earlier. But this weird insistence on exceptionalism, on everything being New! Uniquely! Different!, makes that impossible to admit.
That’s a good substitution analysis.
Evgeny Whathistface, who I am not a fan of, was correct when he called it The Teflon Industry. Within that realm, it seems Google has the most teflon of all. I can’t imagine Soghoian even going to bat for Microsoft. There is something weird and horrible about Google’s penetration of the anti-surveillance hive mind. In this exchange, Soghoian looks like a guy who’s getting paid to me, or aspires to be.
Yeah, I hadn’t really considered how tech is a platform for rebranding capitalism.
[excerpt from the Wired article (linked above) on Christopher Soghoian]
“And he talks. A lot. With a slight British accent—the product of a childhood spent in London—he speaks in 1,000-word bursts with nary a …. pause. Whether he’s talking to staffers on the Hill, presenting at conferences, or giving interviews (to places like NPR)…… “I can walk into a room and explain how a cookie works or how geolocation tracking works or how encryption works or why data retention is a bad idea,” he says. “This is what I’m good at.”
Jesus H. Christ, all these shills coming out of the woodwork….first we get treated to the Snowden/GG/Omidyar Spectacle that was not even entertaining, and now this google shill who can’t keep his fucking mouth shut.
What next? Will a group of disillusioned Glennbots split off and form the Soghoian Sect, a cult devoted to defending the copyrights of Google Maps and Google Earth against all those starving artists who might be trying to steal them?
The ACLU and EFF and GlennCo are all part of the same racket. Shilling for power in the guise of defiance.
You know, now that you mention it, Copyleft thinking has been very zeitgeisty over the last 5-10 years. A period which happens, by the purest of coincidences i’m sure, to correspond to the rise of multi-billion dollar industry players whose business models either relied on or benefited from playing fast and loose with copyright. Google in particular had been skirmishing with Big Content pretty much constantly over issues like youtube takedown procedures, the google books class action lawsuit, demands to censor infringing sites from search results etc. Most of those major conflicts seem to have been resolved or are on track for resolution (i.e., finding a way to shift liability directly onto the users). Most of the major tech related legal conflicts happening right now seem to be around things like privacy rights or Uber-style regulatory evasion. So now that Silicon Valley isn’t the upstart relying on disruption of established IP rights, will opposition to IP dry up as an acceptable mainstream position? I’m going to keep a lookout for responsible tech-oriented leftists hippie punching Stallman.
Also: Goddamnit Tarzie, I just finished reading your archives. I like your blog, but now I have to rethink like a good 60% of my allegiances. Which is kind of a hassle.
I am glad you said this, because the disparity between Soghoian’s antfucking over copyright and the history you cite blew right past me. I think you’re onto something. Soghoian’s tweet stream sure suggests he and Google are joined at the hip so merits watching.
I couldn’t be less sorry or more flattered.
“I couldn’t be less sorry or more flattered”
An appropriate response! Mind you that 60% includes all of the allegiances I rethought during the great “Holy fuck, these assholes still like Obama?” Allegiance Rethink of mid to late ’09.
It’s like an onion. Spoiler alert: trust no one.
Stallman has been right on most of these piss fights since the 1980s.
It reminds me of how the free software movement was co-opted whole in the late 1990s by the same chirpy, self-promoting fucking sociopaths who occupy the thrones in Silicon Valley now. Stallman was left holding scraps.
But he’s still going. He hasn’t given an inch.
Trust no one over 30…
The fact that the left-libertarian “alliance” is all libertarian, no left had never really dawned on me until reading the last few posts. It was only a few years ago that the idea that “income inequality” was a problem seemed to really gain purchase in the public consciousness. It seemed like people had a problem with the system–time to get stuff done! Successfully taking a lot of that anger and steering it to further the aims of the oligarchs and their private panopticon is so diabolically clever. I had a suspicion when the anti-SOPA campaign was passed off as a successful grassroots campaign rather than Silicon Valley defeating Hollywood that this dynamic was possible, but this whole thing is on another level.
In related news, a guy in California returned $125K that fell off an armored car because “there are cameras everywhere now.” http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/31/us-usa-california-cash-idUSKBN0EB03M20140531?irpc=932
It only really just crystallized for me, via a combo of replying to Louis Proyect about the Left-Right convergence and seeing how much the Leak Keepers keep darkening the line between corporate and state, while Greenwald and co sing the praises of beneficent oligarchs. Someone in the Proyect thread remarked that Greenwald embodies the Left-Right convergence more than anyone and that got me spinning on how this ‘convergence’ is just a right-wing coup.
Of course, these people aren’t libertarians really. Libertarianism functions on the right the way Liberalism functions on the left. Something to aspire to while you comply with what’s there. It’s just neoliberalism morphing again into something the more skeptical rubes will still buy. It’s really the death knell of the Establishment Left, which has been completely absorbed and demanded nothing in return except cheap resistance theatre. I shudder at what the end game is.
That’s a great insight on the extent to which this has siphoned off class resentment. More evidence that Occupy’s ‘genius’ move of ‘No Demands’ could not have been more idiotically self-destructive. Really not hard to co-opt disquiet, disappointment and ‘A Better World is Possible.’ It’s interesting looking back at Occupy, how it morphed from confrontation with inequality to confrontation with state authority, mostly in the form of the police. An invitation to libertarian appropriation in retrospect.
“I had a suspicion when the anti-SOPA campaign was passed off as a successful grassroots campaign rather than Silicon Valley defeating Hollywood…”
Are you sure about this? Aaron Swartz offered a pretty compelling narrative about how it wasn’t Silicon Valley who defeated it at all.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/06/03/excuse-remains-obamas-failure-close-gitmo/
this post by GG does what you are saying. especially as you read the comments.
just in case i was not clear it goes something like this
GG thinks gitmo should be closed
O promised to close Gitmo, but says he can’t because restricted by the law
O then releases prisoners from G says his power greater than law
GG asks if he can do this then why can’t he release all G prisoners.
GG thinks spying wrong
GG says NSA not obeying constitution
O says NSA operate within law as determined by him and powers granted to him
GG says O has no such power and is abusing the rule of law
GG has no “guiding beliefs/principles/philosophy” or whatever you want to use to frame it. Thus as in your example above they can one minute be defending power and the next “appear” to be defending the powerless.
I don’t find any of it new. most people are walking contradictions, and have never stopped to think how they can “support” two contradictions at the same time, because in their mind they do not contradict.
Nah. Heat vampires are in a special class of contradiction. Not new but also not like everyone else. Most people are more consistent, but that’s beside the point. Elites have an endless pool of aspiring mediators from which to select. If they wanted our discourse managed by more principled and intellectually consistent people, they’d have it. It’s kinda like our fucked up educational system that way. People like GG are a custom fit for propaganda, and if they weren’t, they’d be languishing in obscurity.
ACLU filed a Friend of the Court brief in the Citizens United case and has vigorously defended the SCOTUS decision that overturned more than a century of campaign finance law. Greenwald — a paid consultant for ACLU — spent considerable political capital of his own defending Citizens United in the face of withering criticism from a wide range of legal observers when he was at Salon.
ACLU has been primarily serving the interests of power and money for quite a while now It’s no wonder Greenwald does the same.
But at least he got around to posting another denunciation of Obama and the craven Democrats, so there is that.
Yeah I am aware of Citizens United etc. Free Speech Absolutism has been a pet peeve around here for a while.
When it comes to ACLU and Greenwald, the question comes down to “liberty for whom to do what?”
The answer is clear: the liberties they advocate apply to those with power and money — be they Google or Omidyar or whomever they deem worthy — and those with less or without any can pound sand.
After all, that’s how they see the Constitution — not just the Holy First Amendment. It protects money. It protects power. And they see their own role as protectors of the Constitution against the inroads of the Rabble.
ACLU and Greenwald lost a lot of public support over their advocacy of Citizens United decision. But they don’t care, do they? They picked up oligarchic support that matters a good deal more to them.
Which explains why Soghoian is so intent on protecting Google’s “liberties” and intellectual property.
On an intuitive level … I’m thinking that the <a href=http://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf_soghoian/all/wired™ link, which Webb Traverse (news anchor) (above) provided, is truly instructive: ….FTC? ….Google intern? ….. (two pieces of severe indigestion, right off the top).
If a human bean has the time (and constitution), they can travel from there to peruse Slight Paranoia (paranoia.dubfire.net/ (no www)); and from there, to his GOOG™ blog spot stain profile to his other GOOG™ blog spot stain, Stop-Phishing @ IU (stop-phishing.blogspot.com/ (no www) blog spot stain) and Travel Log (travel.dubfire.net/ (no www)), to follow ‘up’ (down the sidewinder inhabited ‘bunny’ hole) of their intuitions.
(I’ve used the word stain as in: marked and traceable evidence (what is good for the GOOG™, should also be good (i.e.: ‘fair play’) for the human beans); though, other usages of that word, no doubt, will most likely come to mind in this particular instance.)
one more thing GG censored while he spends his time talking about GITMO on twitter. I really effing despise him.
How The West Spies On The Middle East: The Location Of The GCHQ’s Top Secret Internet Spy Base Revealed
Tarzie I know you are done writing about him, but one last piece “your firework display” putting it all together why GG is a effing shit. so people who are waking up late to just how much damage and control GG has caused with his handling of these leaks can read it in one place.
I know you probably will not do it, but i thought I would ask.
I don’t know what to make of this scoop about the Spy Base. GG has acknowledged it but not really commented. This is the same journalist he slammed a while back as being in cahoots with the GCHQ when he wrote another story on the same topic. I wrote about it at the time.
But a bigger question is just how did Campbell get these files: if only Snowden had access to them originally, and he only provided his data dump to selected outlets, of which the Guardian was the primary when it came to UK-related matters (and which was subsequently and quite violently silenced), and then the data trove followed Glenn Greenwald who Snowden picked as his mouthpiece, at the new outlet, the Intercept, then why didn’t someone But a bigger question is just how did Campbell get these files: if only Snowden had access to them originally, and he only provided his data dump to selected outlets, of which the Guardian was the primary when it came to UK-related matters (and which was subsequently and quite violently silenced), and then the data trove followed Glenn Greenwald who Snowden picked as his mouthpiece, at the new outlet, the Intercept, then why didn’t someone post these previously?
from the article I linked. asking why were these not published. we know why msm didn’t but what. is GG excuse? he still hasn’t explained why he redacted “Afghanistan, we also know that AR of guardian said ton of files on iraq/afghanistan. why hasn’t GG published those. especially in the light of the fact that Michael Hastings wrote about the army guy just released, and was working on a follow-up before his unfortunate “accident”. is there anything in ES files that might shine a light on this. We will never know as GG seems to think his time is better spent arguing what power O does or does not have re GITMO.
I know, I should just forget the whole thing and accept this ES expose has been nothing more than a “tease” that has, it seems achieved only one result,everyone now knows they are being spied on. Oh and it has also turned brand GG into business machine.
GG has suggested that Duncan Campbell probably got the leak from someone at the Guardian, though when Campbell broke this story the first time with fewer details, Greenwald accused the UK Government of ‘leaking documents about itself.’ More and more I think this is all just part of the spectacle. I don’t think it matters much. I think they just want us to keep looking.
Maybe he can parlay it into a sitcom.
Laura’s in the bedroom, inventing situations.
Glenn is on the street today, scouting up locations.
They’ve enlisted all their family.
They’ve enlisted all their friends.
It helped saved their relationship,
And made it work again
re. the UPDATE: why would the tech savvy who should know better try to pass off default encryption processes on the part of email providers as if it actually meant anything?
This stuff is not my strong point. Why is it meaningless? Because Google can decrypt it for anyone that wants it?
In short, yes. But they wouldn’t even have to. As it is, it’s not a daunting task for a third party to decrypt. It’s akin to locking your door because you know a thief will jiggle knobs ’til he finds one unlocked. But thieves also pick locks and break down doors, especially when they know which house they wanna get into.
The longer answer involves the fact that this stuff is damn-near nobody’s strong point except the few who are able to exploit it. It reminds me of “even the experts don’t understand these complex financial derivatives”.
But, yeah, when something is not our strong point, we rely on others to help us out or stay away altogether. Naturally, avoiding email and the Internet is pretty much out of the question at this point – so good thing Google has come to the rescue with email encryption; -) But there are a few different issues at play here. First, what they’ve been doing “by default” is no different than what many providers offered way before Google decided to capitalize on it, and countless have begun since it’s become a trending topic.
Next, they publicized yesterday (the day after the Journal piece) a plug-in Chrome users will be able to activate, ostensibly to provide end-to-end encryption. I believe Mozilla Thunderbird has offered something like this for a while.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I repeat my own aphorism: It’s not oversight unless you’re the one doing the overseeing.
I am not one to give a crap about my digital privacy, though I don’t want anyone bogging down my computer just as a matter of personal preference. So I sure as hell am not going to start using some crap on offer to protect me from having my emails read.
Of greater concern, in my opinion, is the harassment and criminalization of speech. Hiding that speech is not the answer.
Sorry for my comment length.
Which is related to one of my concerns — open source intelligence — where they scarf up data you’ve made public willingly via blogs and social networks and apply analytics to discern how interesting you are.
Now that a year has passed and the end result is a campaign to get everyone to use encrytion, it really does look like some kind of social psychosis took hold back in June.
No reason ever to apologize on comment length.
Shit, I keep forgetting that courageous radicals who belittle the rest of us for not base jumping onto the roof of the TSA support capitalist insiders.
J-j-j-jackpot! Mouthpiece for electoral politics and digby!!
Oh fuck you’re killing me. LOL.
All the tweets are just hilarious. Exspeshully on this speshul day, #####Put Stars By It######
The horror of realizing that they will be congratulating themselves for this for another year at least.
I’ve gotten into it a few times with Soghoian who is clearly on the payroll of Google which is heavily funding the ACLU, and this funding is very much controlling their agenda. Here, I caught him deflecting blame from Google when the NY Times article (notable co-written by Laura Poitras) came out on the NSA’s use of facial recognition technology.
Just a bit of reading around Twitter, proved the technology came from Google and that they have been continuing to develop it, despite their claims to the contrary.
It is intensely annoying to me, that Soghoian sits on Twitter all day long and provides deflection for Google for its massive spying and data hoarding and selling, but he is not alone, not at all. It seems like every day lately I discover a new Google “employee”, Yikes. What they are funding, the extent of it, the propaganda! What I want to know is Who is the Goebbels behind Google??? Someone has thought all this out very hard, and put all these pundits into place, for distancing and to serve their agenda.
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