How long until Knowledge is illegal?

YES! But you have to consider other factors as well. For example, parents teaching their kids "right and wrong." Isn't that a form of brainwashing? It tends to follow the parents perspective. Ask the average person on the street a question, and you will either get a)an unrelated story b)swearing c)"go away" d)a completely stupid answer. My point is, technology has greatly magnified the ability of one person to have an effect on others. Next time you see awrestling match on televison, look at the croud shoots. Ask yourself, "would I like thouse people to have a bigger impact on my life?" Your answer will most likely be no. Point is: THE AVERAGE HUMAN IS A COMPLETE DOLT. GOVERMENT HELPS TO CONTROL THE TRUE MORONS, BUT IN THE PROCESS TAKES AWAY SOME OF THE INTELLIGENT PEOPLES' FREEDOM> THIS IS INHERET OF DEMOCRACY. On the other hand, I do hate getting the finger and a laugh from politicians.

Y'know, whenever you enter into a discussion with an American about civil liberties, a post by someone on the 'rights' of one American to shoot another is never far away.

But in this thread the gun is ony analogous to the knowlege that we were discussing because neither can be blamed for the actions of their owner. Guns don't kill people. People do. Knowledge doesn't hack other peoples systems and steal all the credit card numbers. Hackers do.

Thankfully knowledge is a lot harder to obtain than a firearm (in the states - over here you can be arrested for carrying a 2" pen-knife). Unfortunatley, once you do have it, and in this information age, knowledge can be a much more powerful thing, and the consquesnces of it's abuse much more devestating.

[draziw] - Thanks for the quote!

"Windows has detected that a gnat has farted in the general vicinity. You must reboot for changes to take affect. Reboot now?"

How I lauged ;)

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No one can blame the American phyce for its paranoid streak. Let's face it, you boys have been lied to often enough by sucessive goverments, but to suggest that the Internet is in some way 'bugged' by CIA, NSA or which-ever flavour of paranoia-driven Boogey-man you prefer, is in reality absurd.

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It's funny how you should say that because UK is part of Echelon, just like New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Canada. The so-called jukuza-countries I belive.
It is even said that the european "sniffer" is situated on the west coast of england, on the atlantic cable.

The European Union investigated Echelon last year and found that it very much exists but that it is overestimated. It is however quite official that it triggers on certain keywords in unencrypted internet traffice and records the packages for later analysis.
Read the investigation if you're at all interested.

Cheers,
Magnus

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My main point is that a "freedom" is/was/has been that it is "legal" for people to carry guns in this country (within a few stipulations, sure)... now, the government has decided that, because of the mass stupidity of people, it's ok to take away that right from the overall population instead of just penalizing the idiots out there. This doesn't affect criminals, it only affects so-called "honest" people.

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Yeah but hey, 400 years ago it was legal to burn witches.
Also, you must consider the freedom time history has given you. Votes for women, the right to be gay, better rights for black people and minorities in general. You have the right to confess to any religion you want. Try doing that in Europe 400 years ago.

What I mean is that laws, even constitutional rights sometimes must change because they were invented in the first place to cover a need that might have been urgent in the past but isn't any more.

Funny thing is that when we gain right we call it evolution and civilization but when we loose old rights we scream in anger of mutilated freedom.

Might be worth some though.

Cheers,

Mankan - read on a few lines. I fully agree with you that the capability is there. But as you rightly suggest, that capability is very much overestimated. I know from my own expolits in cyberspace that trying to listen to a promiscuous datastream in real time is just impossible. It's like listening for a pinfall in a thunderstorm.

If you already have a suspect then the use of such ELINT to gather evidence is a different matter, no different in fact to any other sort a information gathering, because there is a specific target.

I personally would doubt the technical capacity of monitoring of the _entire_ datastream, without alerting private and commercial IDS systems, even for keyphrases. But I am more than willing to stand corrected if you can produce a documentation to the contrary.

The problem here is that the size of any computer with enough HDD capacity to store transcripts of every datagram that passed though the atlantic pipe (terrabytes/sec) for later analysis would be so large as to be visible from orbit.

The fact that my own network is in the 3rd party room at the facililty on the west-coast of England that you refer to, and the fact that I have never seen a computer there of the size which would be required for such an enterprise leads me to conclude that one doesn't exist.

But I digress.

My point is that even if such a capability /were/ to exist, you have to have done something pretty stupid to make it worth the governments time and effort to trace it. Let's image the following email:

x-sender: [email protected]
x-receiver: [email protected]
Received: from mail pickup service by taliban.org with Microsoft SMTPSVC;
Wed, 5 Sep 2001 14:54:53 -0900
Reply-To: <[email protected]>
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: Terrorist Attack
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 14:54:52 -0600
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300
Message-ID: <Taliban.org>

Dear Yasa,

The preperations for the aeroplane attacks on the world trade cente are
nearly complete. Mavis sends her love. Kill all Americans.

Love,
Osama

If the US government had had the capacity (technically or in terms of HUMINT) to read this email, would that have been a bad thing? I would suggest not.

As a sysadmin I - within my own my own network community - have a right of sanction against those in that community who abuse the system. And whilst 'listening' to traffic in real time is impossible and largely pointless anyway, if you abuse the system, I /will/ find you. But if you vandalise bus shelters or mug old ladies, you run the risk of the authorities knocking on your door. This is no different. You broke the rules. You made yourself a target. The equation is very BASIC ;):

dim Jail as Unpleasant
dim NotJail as OkByMe

Dim Jail as Unpleasant
Dim NotJail as OkByMe

Sub Main()
Select case (amount of trouble you caused)=>(the effort required to catch you)
Case TRUE
do
DoEvents
Loop until caught
Exit(Jail)
Case else
Exit(NotJail)
End Select
End Sub

Please find attached all of the [TAB]s that Anti-Online removed from my last post. I hope it makes the code a bit more readable. :)

use the code-tag. They are monospaced, thus your tabs will be preserved...

Thanks for that Guus -- Wow, you've got lots of dots and some of them are /shiny/! Who do you sleep with to become a senior member? ;)

But I digress.

You mean like <code>[code here]</code>? (not seen that b4)

I also would like to express my gratitude to the people people of Italy for the invention of pizza. Good on y'lads! :)

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The problem here is that the size of any computer with enough HDD capacity to store transcripts of every datagram that passed though the atlantic pipe (terrabytes/sec) for later analysis would be so large as to be visible from orbit.

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Well, from the information that can by found on Echelon it is suggested that the system triggers on certain phrases and words such as Jihad, bomb, nuclear. Hi NSA! :)
Anyway, I'll see if I can dig some info up for you. I know I've read parts of the investigation online somewhere.

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If the US government had had the capacity (technically or in terms of HUMINT) to read this email, would that have been a bad thing? I would suggest not.

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Of course not. I'm the anti-libertarian, pro-government dude in this thread remember?

Cheers,