h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Now that Edward Snowden (my hero!) has told the world what any sane person could have guessed the government were up to:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/06/why-edward-snowden-is-a-hero.html

Let's think about what this means.

THE NSA IS WATCHING YOU. Especially if you mess around online.

That means: whatever you write, some sweaty, nosy SPY has to read. In order to evaluate its importance to US national security.

There's a great deal of comfort to be derived from the knowledge that paranoia breeds readers.

Personally, I am salivating over the idea that somewhere, some nasty little Harvey Duff of an enemy of free speech is being forced to read stuff like this: A71384222 I chuckle over the idea that I might have a cool profile among those people, with whom I profoundly disagree on all important matters.

So, campers, here's our opportunity:

WRITE MORE. Write often, and long, and truthfully. Tell all of your ideas. Philosophise, criticise, analyse. Let the beggars have it!

Somewhere, in some underground bunker, surrounded by EMP-dampening, some geek is going to have to read it.

Just to ssee if it's 'credible intel', of course.

Viva la revolucion!

...that's why the most recent two updates to Firefox played such hob with 'private browsing' and other history erasure programs?

The NSA is notable for 'security measures' that provide ready trapdoors into other people's information systems, meanwhile leaving them vulnerable to any other hacker who happens on the trap door, the 'lazy and careless of real security' approach to snooping.

I fear for their sanity, if they're scrutinising twitter... and my twitter feed.... Only last night a fabulus conversation with some random twitterite, I was having about training seagulls, to be weapons, and training them to carry bombs... I can't imagine what a sane geek hidden away in the depths of an American Military instalation might make of that kind of gibberish, we created in only a short hour or so I could tie up whole platoons of spooks.... heh

...old idea, but ther's always some idiot to whom its new, crazy and stupid enough to run right out and do the dreadful thing...

I have lots of mixed feelings about this.

Did I always suspect this had to be happening? In which case my paranoia is cured. Everything I was worried about has come true

Did Snowdon actually leak any information at all, or did he just confirm that the spies follow a process that they could always have had access to.

Should we ever at any point have felt safe typing information into a keyboard and pressing a send button? It's not the information per se, but the aggregation of it which amounts to a breach of privacy.

If I type my personal details into a social networking site, then it's my own lookout, but this is all about aggregation of information below the line, which we could quite reasonably have considered to be private and perishable.

If what Snowdon says is true, then there would have to have been an extraordinary amount of collusion between all the data operators, and all would have had to be sworn to secrecy. Was this revelation inevitable eventually?

Whichever way I think of it, Snowdon has done nothing but a public service. We should all be grateful to him, and I would like someone to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Well put, Icy.

He seems to have set the cat among the pigeons in Congress. Let's hope something comes of it.

And 2legs, you go, fella, that's what I'm talking about.

Has anyone read Philip K Dick's 'The Zap Gun'? Dick, thou should'st be living at this hour, geekdom hath need of thee...

http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/reviews/review-by-jason-koornick-the-zap-gun-1967/

I have to say, it explains the amount of paranoid lunacy you read on the Internet when you realise the NSA are sitting glued to their screens all day and night.

I'm hoping they have Nigel bookmarked.

ahh... but no....

The one thing, if one thing only, which this proves, without doubt, is that we are not* paranoid.

It is all true... for as we wrote it, it was true... True, we had our descentors, in our midsts, who did reject our prophercy, our predictions, and now who's laughing... yeh, still us, the internet nutcases, assorted bus-nutters and loons.... When will they listen, we cried, from our dark, technological rooms of safety... typing into the night, informing those who could listen to be informed, of the plans... all of the plans... taking our liberty, the way they monitor our brains.... try to steal our cheese.... and now... we know its true... Oh, how they laughed, when I installed the cheese safe... and armed it with deterients.... at least I now know where my chese is... and they'll get a supprise, the next time they try to steal it... that's for sure
You see... no one... not even the powers that be, or 'the man', suspects... they can't suspect the seagulls... that is why its so perfect.... for all of their evil snooping on us, and our cheese, one day they'll ifnd out the truth, and we, or perhaps even the seagulls will have the last laught.... well, actually maybe not the seagulls, they dont' take well to body armour, and the explosives can be a little distructive if they're not in body armour... <tit.

*stands underneath the floor and does a manicial err manikial err manic laugh

Meanwhile Julian Assange is still trapped in an Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Maybe he could be tried in absentia in Sweden with maybe a representative acting for him or/and him appearing in court in a video link-up. Although as it stands (according to wiki) the Swedish police just want to question him (in relation to a sexual assault investigation).

With the "War on Terror" everyone is a suspect (e.g. elderly white british grannies being stripped searched for weapons): hence the "need" to access all communications data and feed it through data mining algorithms on supercomputers.

One of the worst effects is that the gov't spies on investigative reporters and their efforts to control this information makes it possible to cover EVERYTHING nasty the gov't does and does not want its citizens to know. Nobody will record drone attack aftermaths with their cell phones to show dead civilians where gov't sources claim are terrorist camps.

Here is an op-ed piece by the Christian Science Monitor on the situation:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0531/Protect-the-watchdog-press-from-Obama

Well, duh. How else can they stay in power? They have to be able to root in people's personal Stuff so they can find something to discredit the whistleblowers with.

What a shame for them that Snowden appears to be a heterosexual in a committed relationship...of course, they could manufacture a rumour or two, perhaps... They've already got people pointing out that he got a GED...

This means nothing to you folk. A GED is the diploma you can get in night school to make up for not finishing high school. Traditionally, it pointed to academic problems - hardly the case for an IT professional.

Just to clear the record: These days, with the decline of quality in many US high schools, I have known a number of academics whose bored children have done GEDs to avoid wasting their time - and endangering life and limb - in crowded, dangerous city school systems where their 150+ IQs were social handicaps. They just did the work online and took the test.

One such young man I know of went on to university, then did postgraduate work in Tokyo. GED doesn't mean 'semiliterate'.

I thought Snowden was just a two-bit commie, a traitor to the US and all its values ... surely that's enough dirt to convict him for life

...a little off all fours, did you know the average American IQ has dropped to 98?

When the IQ testing system was initially established, the average the time was arbitrarily made equal 100...

...like 2 degrees of global warming...

I have, ahem, done some research. Here is the breakdown by US state of average IQ:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/average-iq-by-state-honest-numbers-at-last-0

Paulh lives in the smartest state. I live in a bog-standard average state. Certain West Coast Researchers are surrounded by dumb people. They must be pulling up the curve. Shame on you, California.

Please ignore the statistician's feeble attempt at humour. He's made the Republican states red and the Democrat states blue, just to make some obscure point. The redness of the bottom of the list is, therefore, a cheap shot.

I would like to point out that the reason North Carolina scores so much higher than Mississippi (and California) is that the scientists in Research Triangle Park have probably tipped the scales, balancing out the shade-tree mechanics and such.

where I used to work, in the chemical industry. We once had "time and motion" men come to do a survey, so see if various productions could be done better - I told my boss that they'd have to have plenty of time to view me, co's they ain't going to see much motion


the NSA can have a few hours fun reading my stuff I don't care

On the state by state breakdown on IQ, I'd thought that I was seeing some deviation from the mean, for example supermarket baggers whom asked for whipped cream for strawberry shortcake, bring mayonaise instead.

Mind you, I'd known that something was wrong at that particular store when I didn't see shortcakeand whipped cream displays with the strawberries in the first place.

One more reason I shouldn't leave this state (California), might bring the average down even more.




More seriously, language barriers are probably part of the problem.




Back to the NSA, I don't care particularly whether they read my stuff either.

Its those open trapdoors which anyone with requisite skill might exploit that worry me.

>> We once had "time and motion" men come to do a survey <<

They often have the premise that people are mechanical objects in a Newtonian space.