June 2013
GPGMail | GPGTools (OpenPGP Tools for Apple OS X) →
gpgtools.org
GPGMail | GPGTools - OpenPGP/PGP/GPG tools for Apple OS X (GPGMail, GPG Keychain Access, …). To encrypt, decrypt, validate, and sign files and e-mails.
Mailvelope →
mailvelope.com
Browser extension that allows to exchange encrypted emails following the OpenPGP encryption standard
In efforts to be a good father to Ripley, my personal guide is just do the complete opposite of anything my own father did.
“Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence committee, separately acknowledged this week that the agency’s analysts have the ability to access the “content of a call.”
—
Feinstein voted for the extension of the PATRIOT ACT (and was actually the first Democratic cosponsor of it) and the FISA provisions. She sponsored PIPA. She introduced the first Assault Weapons ban and has been quoted saying she would like to go door to door and seize all guns from all citizens. She used to carry a gun now has armed body guards. This woman has no respect for the constitution, no respect for private citizens and clearly endorses a world with one set of rules for the privileged few, and another set of rules for everyone else. She’s the definition of Aristocracy.
Can we please stop reelecting her? Seriously, WTF.
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants →
news.cnet.com
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
“You should care about surveillance because once the system for surveillance is built into the networks and the phones, bad guys (or dirty cops) can use it to attack you. In Greece, someone used the police back door on the national phone company’s switches to listen in on the prime minister during the 2005 Olympic bid. Chinese hackers used Google’s lawful interception back door to hack Gmail and figure out who dissidents talked to. Our communications systems are more secure if they’re designed to keep everyone out – and adding a single back door to them blows their security models up. You can’t be a little bit pregnant, and the computers in your pocket and on your desk and in your walls can’t be a little bit insecure. Once they’re designed for surveillance, anyone who can bribe or impersonate a cop can access them.”
—The NSA’s Prism: why we should care (via wilwheaton)
Play
Oh this thing on my dashboard is awesome I’m going to reblog it.. oh wait… it’s got 20k+ notes already? Forget it.
“Facebook is the living dead: the most popular, least relevant social network where teenagers and adults alike gather out of fear of missing out on things that don’t even make them happy”
—
A Pew study says that 94 percent of teens use Facebook, and hate it. (via midwestloveaffair)
truth
(via clockspider)
At Veggie Grill
OMFG. New vegan fish tacos. – at Veggie Grill with Tara Tiger – See on Path.
On Selling A Domain Name →
cruftbox.com
This is an awesome story that all of us who do things, and think about doing things, and plan to do things but sometimes don’t always do things should read and think about.
Operation Troll The NSA →
trollthensa.com
If millions of us, all the same time, call or email someone with our keywords-of-terror-filled script, we can give our nation’s impressive surveillance apparatus the kind of test it deserves.
AT 7:00 PM EST ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, CALL/EMAIL THIS SCRIPT:
Hey! How’s it going? I’m all right.
My job is so shitty I wish could overthrow my boss. It’s like this oppressive regime where only true believers in his management techniques will stay around. I work marathon-length hours and he’s made all these changes that have made it the worst architecture firm to work at in Manhattan. Like he moved the office to the Financial District and fired my assistant. She was the only one who knew where the blueprints were! I need access to those blueprints to complete my job! F my life, right? And he keeps trying to start all these new initiatives to boost revenue, but seriously we just need to stick to what we do best. There’s only one true profit center. I seriously feel ready to go on strike at any second.
I just read this article about how these free radical particles can cause the downfall of good health and accelerate aging. These could actually cause death to millions of Americans. If these particles are flying around undetected everywhere, does that mean we’re all radicalized?
Have you seen the second season of Breaking Bad? I just finished it. I couldn’t believe that episode where they poison the guy with ricin! That was the bomb! I won’t say any more because I don’t want to reveal the earth-shattering events to come.
Oh! So I’ve been planning a big trip for the summer. I’m thinking of visiting all of the most famous suspension bridges in the United States. So probably like the Golden Gate Bridge, The Brooklyn Bridge, and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. I’m gonna bring my younger brother and I know he’ll want to go to bars, so I’m thinking of getting him a fake drivers license, but I hope that doesn’t blow up in my face.
Okay, I gotta run! I’m late for flight school. I missed the last class where we learn how to land, so I really can’t miss another one. Talk to you later!
LOL
Diamonds Are A Sham And It’s Time We Stop Getting Engaged With Them →
au.businessinsider.com
The next time you look at a diamond, consider this. Nearly every American marriage begins with a diamond because a bunch of rich white men in the 1940s convinced everyone that its size determines your self worth. They created this convention – that unless a man purchases (an intrinsically useless) diamond, his life is a failure – while sitting in a room, racking their brains on how to sell diamonds that no one wanted.
What to Do If Your Boyfriend Is the NSA Whistleblower: a Step-by-Step Guide →
howaboutwe.com
“He has had ‘a very comfortable life’ that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared… Read More
Apparently he didn’t tell his girlfriend, who he lived with, what he was about to do.
Play
Amazon.com: Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (9781594035227): Harvey Silverglate: Books →
amazon.com
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.
Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations →
guardian.co.uk
The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows
This is the most important thing online today. If you do nothing else, make sure you watch this video.
“My biggest fear… is that nothing will happen.”
— Edward Snowden
“
I, and I suppose many others, am perfectly aware that this NSA program is not *new*. I’m also perfectly aware that the program is probably legal under every existing rationale applied to the Fourth Amendment by our nation’s courts.
[…]
…consider the backdrop of these revelations. This week, the Supreme Court announced that law enforcement could collect DNA samples from non-criminals provided there was an arrest. There are thousands of pre-textual arrests a day, and a speeding ticket could lead to your DNA being logged and your being held in jail for 24 hours without trial, arraignment or access to counsel. We are a nation of mass incarceration, often for non-violent crimes like drug possession. So for many many Americans it is only ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ that they aren’t in jail, with the loss of autonomy and voting rights that entails. We have spent the last decade debating whether it’s OK for the government to visually inspect our genitals to determine whether we’re going to blow up a plane. This story is not merely about a single program, though that’s how the discourse has treated it so far. This thing is about a state whose relationship to its citizenry is out of balance. This is not the state the Founders envisioned.
” —TPM reader ML (via wilwheaton)
Electronic surveillance under Presidents Bush and Obama - The Washington Post →
apps.washingtonpost.com
A timeline of surveillance in the United States from 2001 to 2013: from the Patriot Act to the PRISM program.
“There is this massive surveillance state that the United States government has built up that has extraordinary implications for how we live as human beings on the earth and as Americans in our country, and we have the right to know what it is that that government and that agency is doing. I intend to continue to shine light on that, and Dianne Feinstein can beat her chest all she wants and call for investigations, and none of that is going to stop and none of it is going to change.”
— Glenn Greenwald
“There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States but around the world,” charged Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for the British newspaper “The Guardian,” speaking on CNN. “That is not hyperbole. That is their objective.”
— Glenn Greenwald: U.S. wants to destroy privacy worldwide
