NSA & BitCoin*

State of Deception: Why won’t the President rein in the intelligence community? by Ryan Lizza

Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire by Charles Stross

"Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell (as they get more computationally expensive to generate, electricity consumption soars).... Bitcoin mining software is now being distributed as malware because using someone else's computer to mine BitCoins is easier than buying a farm of your own mining hardware.... Bitcoin violates Gresham's law: Stolen electricity will drive out honest mining.... Bitcoin's utter lack of regulation permits really hideous markets to emerge.... It's also inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society. You think our wonderful investment bankers aren't paying their fair share of taxes? Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion. Moreover, The Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia.... BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind.... Which is fine if you're a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density.... The current banking industry and late-period capitalism may suck, but replacing it with Bitcoin would be like swapping out a hangnail for Fournier's gangrene."

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*Also known as Dunning-Kruegerrands
see Dunning-Kruger_effect

(via DeLong)

Person of Interest

AV Club reviews "Lethe" from Person of Interest

The Butlerian Jihad make a brief appearance.

Butlerian Jihad post

NSA Spying

In Spy Uproar, ‘Everyone Does It’ Just Won’t Do

Diplomats at the United Nations on Friday said that Germany and Brazil, two of the countries whose leaders have been subjected to N.S.A. invasions of their communications, were drafting a General Assembly resolution that would seek to strengthen Internet privacy.

The diplomats, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the drafting is still in the early stages, said momentum for the measure, begun in the summer, had been invigorated by the most recent disclosures of American eavesdropping. A formal resolution could be ready for consideration next month in what would be the first internationally coordinated response to the N.S.A. spying. Word of the German-Brazilian initiative was first reported on the Web site of Foreign Policy.

In Europe, where Ms. Merkel and Mr. Hollande demanded Friday that the United States open negotiations on a “code of conduct” that would limit surveillance, there is a sense that the steady stream of revelations may give them an upper hand. Ms. Merkel keeps repeating the phrase that the Americans must “restore trust.” One way the French and Germans intend to do that is to seek some form of inclusion in the inner circle of American intelligence allies, or at least for a deeper intelligence alliance.

Right now that inner circle, called the “Five Eyes,” consists of the United States and four English-speaking partners: Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Those partners agree not to spy on one another and to share in many of the United States’ deepest intelligence secrets, as the trove of highly classified documents made public by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, makes clear.

But Europe’s demands may go further than a stronger spying relationship with the United States. The European Union wants to require American companies, led by Internet powerhouses like Google and Yahoo, to get the approval of European officials before complying with warrants issued in the United States seeking information, e-mails or search histories about European citizens. The European Union would slap the technology companies with huge fines if they failed to agree to those rules, meaning that the companies would be caught between two masters and several legal systems.

Those kinds of demands would have been hard to imagine during the cold war, when European nations relied on the United States for protection from the Soviet Union, and American spying and rule-setting were tolerated.

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

Butlerian Jihad

The Butlerian Jihad is an event in the back-story of Frank Herbert's fictional Dune universe. Occurring over 10,000 years before the events chronicled in his 1965 novel Dune, this jihad leads to the outlawing of certain technologies, primarily "thinking machines", a collective term for computers and artificial intelligence of any kind. This prohibition is a key influence on the nature of Herbert's fictional setting.

Herbert may have coined the name from 19th-century author Samuel Butler, who has the citizens of Erewhon enact a prohibition on machines newer than 270 years fearing that "it was the race of the intelligent machines and not the race of men which would be the next step in evolution."

 AV Club reviews "Nothing to Hide" from Person of Interest

The new organization seems to be for privacy rights and against infringments by either the government or private sector.

The Service of Snowden by Roger Cohen

HTML 5 code raises concerns over privacy risks

Surveillance State 2.0
(or Welcome to the Panopticon)

The government wants to monitor all Internet communication.  It argues the baddies not longer use telephones which can be tapped.

New York Times article.

Internet Wiretapping Proposal Met With Silence

An Obama administration plan to make wire tapping the Internet easier for law enforcement and national security agencies was met with silence by online companies Monday.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Research in Motion - never shy about issuing press releases - all declined to talk about what would be a major shift in privacy law.

FBI's covering its ass in case of an October surprise? Terrorists win again simply by existing?


Tech Firms Resist India on Software Code Secrets

India basically wants to do the same thing.

The government said it needed to set up a procedure to detect any software embedded in the machines that could be used by foreign governments to spy on or otherwise harm India. Many orders for equipment were stalled for several months and gear from Chinese vendors has been held up for much of the year.

Lawsuits on flash cookies.