Re: A proposal

In message <CABaLYCvkt8y5CW-SiZx4UGZ_ns+FbKtkiKnAQzf38fXQ7ScHoA@mail.gmail.com>
, Mike Belshe writes:

>As we're all aware, there are about 200 countries on this planet.  Many of
>the governments of these countries are using packet siphoning as a key
>information gathering technique.  It's easy today.  They do this for many
>protocols beyond just HTTP.  But what do they do with this information?  We
>know the answer to this too - they are out to kill their dissidents.

You need better sources on foreign policy than you currently rely on.

For one thing, Wikipedia only knows of 23 countries which currently
have capital punishment is a legal outcome.

I'm not aware of more than a handful of really uncivilized countries
which can legally kill or even indefinite detain ("life without
parole") people for political crimes.


>So when we don't protect everything from generic siphoning, we are
>facilitating murders and genocides.  Is this dramatic?  Yeah its dramatic.
> But is it untrue?  No.

Yes, very dramatic.

And in fact untrue and unsubstantiated by any evidence I am aware of.

People are in fact not widely persecuted for reading the news or
watching movies or even porn.

Where and when they are, they are almost invariably sentenced on
either independent evidence, usually witnesses or police informers,
or on traffic logs which merely show that packets flowed between their
IP# and the servers IP# on the alleged time and date.

That is not to say that The Global War On Privacy is not a Deep
Shit Situation for us, but unsubstantiated wild-eyed paranoid
pulling-scary-numbers-out-of-my-ass-alarmism is not the way to
confront the problem..

And for reasons already elaborated many times, your solution doesn't
work either.


-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2013 01:18:11 UTC