Holy hell. Stop the presses.

I just read that Facebook bought out Whatsapp.

...You know, I don't care WHAT kind of integration or WHAT kind of cryptography you have. If you are owned by someone who's beating heart IS government surveillance, you can rest assured they are taking steps to make wanna-be-privacy-seekers FEEL secure, despite the reality which is anything BUT secure.

I guess I closed that pessimism tag a little too early...

It would be nice if surveillance equipment (Stingrays, etc) were included in this list, but the rozzers are free to get all the military grade gizmos they need to keep tabs on your ass.

Hedges' latest article on surveillance and snitches includes pure gold in the form of Solzhenitsyn quotes.

It's been 12 years since I read the Gulag Archipelago and I haven't spent a single thought on it throughout this entire chain of surveillance revelations. The corrosive effect permanent surveillance has on you - the stool pigeons are a wonderful illustration of it.
Even those who acknowledge the chilling effect often qualify it as less corrosive than full-blown "Zersetzung", as if there were a clear-cut line between the two. Dragnet surveillance is Zersetzung.

Anyway, loved this one:

A remarkable fresh breeze was blowing! On the surface we were prisoners living in a camp just as before, but in reality we had become free—free because for the very first time in our lives we had started saying openly and aloud all that we thought! No one who has not experienced this transition can imagine what it is like!

And the informers … stopped informing.

Absolutely. It's a mistake to make assumptions about what AI will be like. The doomsayers too often attribute human qualities to it. It's like speculating about alien intelligence. It will come in bits an pieces as we understand it more. My own guess is that, not weighed down by long obsolete genetic imperatives and human psychological pathologies, it will most likely be (in its higher form) an extraordinarily capable problem solver and prognosticator. It will lack the human flaws that typically motivate the killer AIs of science fiction. Of course, it will probably have it's own unique flaws. I do think it's wise to be wary of software that has developed beyond our capability to understand it (much as we don't understand the workings of our own consciousness).

Probably my primary concern about robotic weapons comes from a DARPA proposal I read about some time in the past. What they wanted was an autonomous, bird sized UAV. It would contain surveillance equipment and sensors, and be able to share the data it collects through a mesh network established with it's fellows and the commanders as well as receive orders. It would be intelligent enough to find a suitable strategic vantage point and hide itself. From there it would simply observe. With a large enough swarm of these, perhaps many thousands, you could send them into a city at night. They would each also potentially carry a small warhead allowing them to launch themselves at and destroy threats. Once these robots were entrenched, which might only take an hour or two, whoever controls them would effectively rule the city. Even if they were cut off from their command structure, they might still retain enough intelligence to recognize a particular individual, someone in a forbidden area, someone holding a weapon, or someone not brodcasting the right IFF signal, or any number of things. There might be no defense against such a thing (though there probably will be).

To me, that concept is terrifying. It's not huge hulking terminator-like war machines that could be the greatest threat, just flying, self-guiding, intelligent hand grenades. All someone would need is the capability to manufacture them. No raising an army, no speeches or threats, just a factory and a design. It's also not too far fetched to believe this capability might be available in just a matter of a few decades. They'll be easier to build than nuclear weapons, and oh so convenient and easy to deploy.

Um.... anyways, I dunno where I was going with that. Just lots of random pontificating, but because it's technology, it's silly to try to stop it with legislation. It will happen, as ChaosEngine rightly points out, the best course of action is to be on top of it and to understand it.

Well i can't say I'm overly surprised, if a little disappointed.

@bobknight33 Had they done that originally no one would have ever heard about it. It did make it to the front page of virtually every major news site.

The apathetic way we as a country have just sort of forgotten about the various government surveillance programs, I'll take literally anything to remind people and get some kind of conversation going. I don't think we're going to get to many chances to walk back some of them back before they're thought of as just part of daily life.

Seems embedding a full size VS video in the new layout gets funky.
http://videosift.com/video/John-Oliver-Government-Surveillance-Interview-w-Snowden#comment-1859385

Pretty disappointing bit really. I mean I get his point (that people generally have a poor understanding of nebulous surveillance techniques and lack of interest unless it is tangibly relevant), but he doesn't need 30+ minutes and a cruddy interview to make it.

I would prefer he would take Stewart's model of making the interviews generally serious rather than conducting them TDS correspondent style.

Thought you would want to see this. Snowden interview w/John Oliver http://videosift.com/video/John-Oliver-Government-Surveillance-Interview-w-Snowden

Of course you stand by your statement, because you it is what you really want to believe, and you are too lazy / ignorant / arrogant, to assume that anyone who disagrees is telling the truth or doing their jobs properly. Which the news are. Which the school is (belatedly). Etc.

"Lewisville Independent School District (ISD) interim superintendent Kevin Rogers announced that their week-long investigation into the February 13 sign incident was conducted through a variety of means. Those included witness interviews, including Flower Mound High School (FMHS) and Lewisville ISD administrators, staff, students and spectators; an in-depth review of surveillance and game footage; social media research; and cooperative, continued communication between FMHS and Plano-East Senior High School (PESH) administrators."

True that, but until recently you couldn't get a photo or video out of your telescope (unless you paid the big bucks for yours). You also couldn't schlepp your telescope up a mountain and get a full, wide angle view and recording of every window on that side of town with the capability of zooming in on ALL of them, one or many at a time, without being visible to any of them. This tech allows constant secret surveillance of large areas that can be re-wound and re-focused to spy into anyone's open window at any time...maybe even at night.

Intelligence sharing between GCHQ and the NSA breached human rights laws, says IPT.

Consequences?

:crickets:

During Carter's single term in office, Iran became a fundamentalist terror state, Saddam began his coup that led to the Iran-Iraq war-Hostage crisis?? Hello?? He gave the Sandinista cash for their fun-in-the-sun-OH-He gave away the Panama Canal, right? Claimed that the Soviets were no longer a 'threat' and they marched right on into Afghanistan. He set-up foreign policy for the next wave of presidential failures and shills for the assholes who really run the show, you know them by their smell, the richest gadjillionaires in the world, who have stolen humanity's hope for anything but anarchy or global fascism and world-government control and surveillance-state, in the form of what the world is fast-becoming. Yeah, the old peanut farmer was was a real piece of work.

Wake up people, the United States presidency has been a ruse for close to fifty years.

Your video, NATO's assassination lists and planetary surveillance, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 28 Badge!

Thanks a lot for the links! I just stumbled upon the English version "We Love Surveillance". http://youtu.be/dlmYHbg5i_w

Still alive after four days of too much info to process and too little sleep. So I'll just dump a list of talks here that might interest you:

- Richard Stallman: Freedom in your computer and in the net
- Jake Appelbaum/Laura Poitras: Assassination lists, planetary surveillance
- Tobias Engel/Karsten Nohl: SS7, the backbone of mobile networks, is fucked beyond repair (two talks, same topic: one, two)
- Laura Poitras and others: cryptography for high-profile journalists
- Bill Scannel: Inside Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg (NSA spy post - wierd talk)
- internet of toilets
- What Ever Happened to Nuclear Weapons?