Category: the state
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Internet mass surveillance shenanigans have one obvious outcome:
the widespread proliferation and use of IPSec AH headers and ESP in transport mode. First one with an easy-to-use solution for the masses wins the Kewpie doll.
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Context switching and the U.S. Constitution
In the world of information technology, there is a concept called context switching, and it means, generally, that you are changing the rules of behavior for the program. Edit mode is a good example. This is what came to mind when reading a legal analysis of a case where the government is trying to force…
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The litmus test for personhood
You are a person if you can be killed. You are a “legal person” if the State can kill you without violating their process. Equality of legal persons begins with comparing how difficult it is to execute the process that results in the State killing you without breaking the law and how long that takes. …
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Is Edward Snowden a traitor?
Probably not, and here’s why I say that. No matter the value you place on the two things that he undeniably has done – violate the various rules for the handling of classified information and in so doing expose the vast array of things being done by the United States in the domain of surveillance…
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identity, privacy, and technology
Let us agree up front that we (society) suck at all three. Now, what do we do about it? Identity is mostly about accountability and a little bit about trust and non-repudiation. Accountability for what you do is a foundation of a civil society, and without it we don’t really function very well. Knowing who…
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deconstructing the Fourth Amendment
Since the USAToday story about the NSA warrant-less-wiretaps broke, we’ve been entertained by numerous inflamed public figures and hyperbolic claims to this or that, many of them centered on privacy, and the legality of searching vast stores of “generic” information. Most of these claims of legal violation come back to Amendment IV of the U.…
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Bush Endorses the Creation of a New National Security Service
via: Voice of America One would hope that years from now we aren’t looking back on this day with a sense of failure. Domestic spying has traditionally been a benchmark of a government with too much power over the people who empower it. The creation of the National Security service certainly has the potential to…
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threats…
The single greatest threat to liberty in an ostensibly free nation-state is that increases in the efficiency of the bureaucratic system for those who execute the system outpace increases in the transparency of the bureaucratic system for those who are subject to the system.
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Fear itself
Someone named Graham Allison has written a book titled, “Nuclear Terrorism, the ultimate preventable tragedy.” There is a web page [archive.org] and the bio indicates that Mr. Allison is the founding dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, which means, I suppose, that he is an old white man, a parent of…
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freedom, control, and command
Ok, so I’ve been playing with this idea of tension between control and command as an paradigm of societies and it occurs to me, while reading Cass Sunstein’s republic.com that there is more depth to that than I recognized initially. Sunstein’s argument in the opening chapters is that the liberty to not encounter ideas, people,…