I agree.
It annoys me that politicians are all in some dumb clique - but this isn’t the US’s fault. Whoever followed through with the illegal detention should have told their superiors to fuck off, and that reaction should have dominoe’d up the ladder until it hit whatever jobsworth received the request.
Unfortunately everyone is just ‘following orders’.
My thinking was of combining encryption with steganography, so you’d have grounds to claim “encryption key? What key? That’s just a video of my cat!”
But I’m no cryptographer.
Oh, so you mean it’s only not cool with you when a person has a worldview or agenda that you don’t agree with! Thank you for clarifying.
Well, you’all can show the US and the British governments what your response will be…that you won’t be cowed by contributing to Greenwald’s journalism directly. See Mr. Greenwald’s newsletter below, via Cryptome:
Dear GT - As you know, I hold a fund-raiser at the end of each year to support my journalism. When I left Salon for the Guardian in August, our agreement was that I would continue to write with full editorial and journalistic independence and, to accomplish that, would continue to rely on support from my readers at the end of each year.
Because I’ve only been at the Guardian for a few months, we mutually agreed the best way to do that this year would be for me to appeal directly to those readers who have supported my journalism in the past rather than writing about it at the Guardian: hence this email.
Reader support has always been and remains vital to my ability to work independently. It enables me to have a research assistant which is invaluable, to fund some travel and technology I use to cover stories, and most significantly, to avoid having to join anyone’s staff or do unconstructive work that distracts from the journalism I think is important. The most important aspect of reliance on reader support is, I’ve always believed, that it frees me from having to concern myself with the reaction of anyone to my work - other than my readers.
As always, donations can be made via paypal (UnclaimedTerritory@yahoo.com), at Google Checkout [(link here)][1], or via mail (checks should be made payable to Dos Santos Management, LLC and sent c/o Daniel Novack, 360 Furman Street, #931, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
I always truly appreciate all forms of reader support. It is deeply gratifying and emboldening, as well as very helpful. Either way, this is an excellent opportunity for me to thank you for your past support -
Glenn Greenwald
I’ve sent my donation this morning. As well, you can read Mr. Greenwald’s blog posts - they’re quite informative. I really appreciate that Mr. Greenwald always, always, always provides links to his sources.
Encryption doesn’t help you when the objective is just to detain inconvenient people on any pretext. Specifically, it’s a crime punishable in the UK by 2 years jailtime (5 years if the cops cry ‘terrorist’) to refuse to hand over the password / encryption key to ciphered data that you hold.
In fact I’m almost more annoyed that the government is being half-arsed about this and backed off after their 9 hour detention. If they’ve decided to abuse powers why stop at 9 hours? Why not serve Miranda with an order for the keys to his encrypted thumbdrives under section §49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - which allows the government to meet reasonable expenses in complying with the order - then put him on a plane to Moscow with an MI6 handler and make him retrieve the keys from Snowden in person? Go all Mordecai Vanunu on his ass and kidnap him in a honeytrap operation, etc. etc.
At least when the Israelis decide to do something underhand, they go about it with conviction.
Britain has a namby pampy “let’s-blockade-Assange-in-the-Ecudorian-Embassy” style of hesitation and hand-wringing which is just infuriating.
You talk about the law in a lot of your posts but you don’t really talk about the rights of the detained. Is it your opinion that the government can arbitrarily detain a person? Or do you think this detention was valid, even if the law was twisted, because Mr. Miranda was doing something illegal? And furthermore, do you think it is illegal for the media to possess classified government information leaked by whistleblowers? If your answer is no to these questions, then you really need to reflect on the fact that this type of detention was designed to interfere with the media in a way that anybody who has respect for the independence of journalism would object to. Just because the government isn’t happy with the media does not mean they should have the ability to interfere with them. Period.
Actions have consequences, so if someone gets murdered then we say, “Well, the murderer had to weigh the penalty for committing the crime against how much they wanted to kill that guy.” And then that makes everything okay, and there is no sense in being upset.
Merely being upset doesn’t change anything, and neither does telling people who are expressing their outrage in an internet forum that they shouldn’t be upset. What should be do on the Boing Boing BBS? Hold an ad hoc session of British Parliament and overturn the law?
I’m as glad as anyone when people doing things I disagree with hand out the rope to hang themselves with, but I really don’t understand what you are trying to convey other than smugness. Apparently we shouldn’t be upset that the UK broke its own laws to target a family member of a journalist who has embarrassed the US. Is that all?
The powerful are having a “War on Truth”.
We need demands, like “suspend data collection”, “deauthorize data collection”, or “defund data collectin”.
Next we need a plan to gather people and influence government. Parts of that plan could be calling reps, writing news papers, raising money, backing candidates, or removing incumbents. Changing your own actions can be the most powerful. Use encryption, use Tor, turn off your mobile phone service, don’t use free cloud solutions like gmail and google search. The best way to affect change is not to participate in the thing you oppose.
I like this idea. You could use a number of similar passphrases for different files… “Let’s see, well, it could be 'By typing this passphrase I am certifying that I have no probable cause for detaining '… or maybe that one is ‘The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground’ … or, try ‘Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it’. No? Hmmm… ‘It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners’? Oh, wait, maybe that was the autodestruct key? Oops.”
Well said, though you’d be amazed how many people genuinely believe they’re impartial…
He actually was talking about a quickly implementable solution, the opposite of what you seemed to think! I know it’s easy to get worked up in forums, but check it out before assuming anything . . . you know what they say about that word, eh?
Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. Mark Twain
Yeah when I posted that I hadn’t seen the articles where it said they had kept the USB keys. I think ssh is the go for file transfer.
The abuses keep getting worse, like a slow drip, and things that a few years ago would’ve shocked the public are now done as a matter of course. I am not eager to see where we will be 5 years from now.
Slow drip?
Many of the world powers (and others as well) are simply following the perilous lead of the last two GW Bush administrations.
Lest we forget that the abuses were massively accelerated and exacerbated by the American public allowing in two Bush administrations along with conservative congresscritters? I know it’s not “cool” and it’s supposedly “old and tired” to look back at what the previous Bush administration did to massively attack our civil rights, but how are we ever doing to move forward if we keep forgetting the past?
Maybe if the American public hadn’t embraced apathy, half-truths and false equivalencies and had, instead, continued to actively support and vote in lesser evil all those years… we might be getting a little better by now instead of falling into the abyss?
Maybe it’s time for the American public to take a long, hard look in the mirror at themselves.
No one should be surprised that the current administration is a rancid pile of abusive crap after having the bar being set so incredibly low by the previous administration.
Maybe we should try voting in lesser evil on a local and national level consistently for a couple of decades and then see how that finally pans out? Because we have NEVER tried that.
I am not eager to see where we will be 5 years from now.
If we continue our previous course where because of a backlash we usher in more Republican rule (by throwing away votes or by not voting at all) due to embracing false equivalence, then a downward spiral is inevitable. We didn’t get to this low point out of the blue by voting in Obama. It was after a rapid loss of rights under the two previous administrations.
The Bush administration caused a worldwide disaster, but the cleanup needs to begin at home.
How about something more seating in reality?
But who to vote for? All the parties are cool with this.
Everyone wants a quick fix, but it doesn’t exist. So we just keep performing knee-jerk, flip-flopping between two parties instead thinking in the long term.
But who to vote for? The reality?
Whomever is the most viable lesser evil and keep doing it for decades. At least here in the USA, we’ve never even tried it. Voting in Obama after two GW Bush terms with many greater evil congresscritters in tow certainly doesn’t even come close to cutting it.
It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but at least we’d finally be taking the medicine if we try it.
Thanks for posting that, Verse. Great music video.
Thank you for being a part of the solution, Nathan.
The best way to affect change is not to participate in the thing you oppose.
I agreed with you up to that point. We need to get involved in our government and support each other. There’s many ways to take action in that regard.
I mean, I agree with you on that point in the sense that more people need to whistleblow and stop supporting “the machine”, but I also don’t think we can’t really hit the machine from a weak, outside position either. We need to continue to crawl inside this beast and eat it from the inside out like Snowden did.
I like this idea. You could use a number of similar passphrases for different files
This exists already even for the same file. If you put in the wrong password, the file opens up but only less damaging dummy files will appear to create what’s called “plausible deniability”. You put damaging stuff in there, but nothing like the sensitive data that the real password for the file opens up.
There’s that, and many variations including: TrueCrypt
