Some of you may have noticed our “Today We Fight Back” pop up banner on the blog. I know it may seem a little political, but this is something that affects the entire Internet, including our site. Just like the SOPA blackout protest, today is an organized protest against NSA mass surveillance. If you live in the U.S. please take a moment to send and email or better yet call your legislators. For everyone else, please spread the word.
I realize the plugin covers most of the site every time it pops up, but it will only be there for a day. In the meantime, if it somehow gets buggy or if it becomes exceedingly annoying please let me know at stimhack@gmail.com
In any case, this whole ordeal is pretty damn cyberpunk.
This has been really interesting to me. Maybe having watched too much Homeland, but I am actually in favor of the measures the NSA has taken to survey potential threats. In a world where terrorist don’t obey rules, I feel like the government needs whatever they can to keep up.
I’d love to help out, but the last time I put my email on one of those I got spammed with political outreach emails that seemed to just want another name on their petition. Gonna hold off on this one, good luck with it though
if you have a cellphone, a credit card and use the internet you’ve traded your privacy for the entertainment and convenience those things provide. if you work and live in a city you are on camera constantly using the ATM, driving past traffic cams or on security cams on different buildings and those if cameras didnt catch you one of the bazillion satellites orbiting over head did.
our love of technology sets up the NSA to mass spy and yet we expect them not to? we want our lifestyle and standard of living preserved and then say dont look for people trying to destroy it ? the american standard of living has a price and giving up some of our privacy is part of that price. guantanamo bay is part of the that price. troops in afghanistan is part of that price.
if you dont like the price you can go live off the grid in a 3rd world country where instead of worrying about the NSA your worries could include people trying to kill you because they dont think your ethnicity should exist on the earth or you have a well with clean water and they want it
im not trying to preach. i participate fully in 1st world living. i enjoy the comfort. hell most of my day is spent thinking about netrunner decks but i think its important people really understand what they are saying when they dont want the NSA mass spying. " i want my standard of living and i want to give up nothing for it." everything has a price in this world. its all well and good to think the price is too high but as soon as someone flies another plane into a building, sets off a bomb in a mall we will all cry " where were you on that one government?!"
oh and the time for fighting this…well that was 2001 when the congress was singing kumbaya and giving away any pretense at privacy we did have by signing the patriot act into law.
I was with every actual security expert I know, telling people (and my reps and senators) that the proposed laws, wars, and intelligence refocus weren’t going to work and were going to set us up for decades of executive overreach and corruption. Don’t just say “oh, look, in the past we made bad decisions, I guess we can’t change them now” — work to make change happen.