Hey, didn't you know, there is an ice age coming ....
In 1970, The Boston Globe ran the headline, "Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century." The Washington Post, for its part, published a Columbia University scientist's claim that the world could be "as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age."
If Assange isn't being pardoned for the nonsensical "crime" of exposing war crimes by the US Government, there is no chance that Snowden will be pardoned. Snowden willingly stole state secrets whereas Assange only published.
Still, when you consider that Snowden is living in Russia, essentially free, and Assange is in a 3.5x2m cell, I don't think Snowden has anything to worry about, except that the royalties from his book will be taken away....but he has his freedom.
As I understand it, the USA isn't after Assange for publishing, mainly because other (friends of the state?) entities have done similar (e.g., NY Times). Assange is being charged with conspiracy to steal said secrets. That is, he was a participant in the "theft." Uncle Sans case isn't focused on the publishing.
Again, as I understand it (which I believe is based on other comments from previous threads on HN).
Not true. Assange hasn't committed a crime but Snowden has committed a crime of theft from the NSA; unlawfully retaining a National Security Agency (NSA) documents containing information classified at the TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION (TS/SCI) level.
Let me clarify. What he did in exposing PRISM was fantastic, the people had a right to know, absolutely, but, the act in itself was still stealing. It's no different to any other theft. When you work for a company and you steal, you can be prosecuted.
We can argue from two points; moral and legal. Morally he did the right thing. Legally he did not.
The difference between Assange and Snowden is vast. Assange is a published of information, no different to The Guardian. He did not steal the data he published. Snowden did, as did Chelsea Manning when he stole the known as Cable Gate.
The point in the article is that the OP thinks Snowden should receive a pardon. My point, is that Assange hasn't even been pardoned for his supposed crime of publishing. If Assange hasn't been pardoned for a lesser crime, then what hope does Snowden have of being pardoned for an actual crime of data theft from the NSA?
Another lady stole data from the NSA. SHe is now facing prosecution and 10 years.
Just a comment from the late great George Carlin in regards to environmental issues like this;
"Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet... nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine... the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, THE PLANET IS DOING GREAT: Been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That somehow, we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and
asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
The planet isn’t going anywhere... we are! We’re going away! Pack your shit folks! We’re going away and we won’t leave much of a trace either, thank God for that... maybe a little styrofoam... maybe... little styrofoam. The planet will be here, we’ll be long gone; just another failed mutation; just another closed-end biological mistake; an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of
fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doing? Ask those people in Pompeii who are frozen into position from volcanic ash how the planet’s doing. Wanna know if the planet’s all right? Ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel
like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who build their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room?"
BTW, you people that keep down voting me because I don't agree with your position, trying to shut me down, stopping me from expressing my opinion, you guys, are fascists.
Don't believe me about climate change scaremongering, here is a long list over the past 50 years of failed environmental disasters....
Please don't source your worldview from a comedian. The snark can be temporarily comforting, but just remember that it's a distraction. Carlin is deeply wrong about the effect we can have on the biosphere. You simply can't simplify the problem without losing all meaningful nuance.
> Carlin is deeply wrong about the effect we can have on the biosphere
> Don't believe me about climate change scaremongering
You both missed the point of this bit. If the planet warms 5C and we are all baked to a crisp, we had an effect on the biosphere AND climate change was correct. Carlin's point is that in a astronomical, deep-time sense, it's not the "PLANET" that's in trouble, it's the human race.
There may have been life on Mars, which may have died due to ignorant people like HashingtheCode, but Mars is still there. Mars is fine. The Martians on the other hand...
He's certainly obfuscating his personal beliefs with comedy, but sure. The thing is, there really isn't a meaningful difference between the destruction of the human race and the destruction of the natural world. That is to say, the reversion of the earth from a vibrant biosphere to an uninhabitable protoplasmic rock isn't the same thing as humanity disappearing in an instant. The problem with Carlin's logic is that sans humans, there isn't even anyone/anything left to even make the value judgement about whether Earth is an outstanding planet; this in conjunction with the fact that we're not facing an isolated disappearance of our species and leaving everything else constant. The way we're going, all the cute animals are coming with us.
He's saying humans are insignificant in terms of the lifespan of the planet and all the creatures that came before us. He is saying the Earth doesn't care for a bit of plastic we have created as it will be incorporated into the Earth. He is saying that the Earth has faced far greater threats than this 2 legged ape and will be here long after we are cleansed from it. He is saying that our arrogant attempts to "save the planet" are ridiculous.
The attempts are not to save the planet, but to reduce our impact to ensure we don’t go extinct and don’t significantly damage the environment. Your use of adjective like “arrogant” just displays your bias and willingness to use the worst possible interpretation of other people’s words. That’s not a way to come to understanding, quite the opposite.
Sounds like you are under the illusion that human beings are a species worth saving, but if you look at the destruction we have caused over the past 100k years, you can make an argument for the opposite, especially in the past 200 years since the industrial revolution.
Human will not change. We will cause destruction no matter where we go, no matter the planet or galaxy, we will destroy it and move on. Even with all our technological advances, we are causing more destruction than ever.
Humans unsettle the balance of nature, we are the problem.
"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus."
In the newspaper articles they make references to the research. For Example in the first paper from 1975 it is Paul R Erlich who is the researcher.
If you want, you can track down the paper. It may be difficult though.
Edit:
In 1968, Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich wrote a well-publicized book entitled The Population Bomb . Ehrlich predicted widespread famine and disaster unless population growth was reduced to zero in America and throughout the world by compulsory methods if necessary.
Their "scientists" have no relevant credentials and are actually "public policy advisors", and usually spread their opinions across multiple unrelated fields (which happens to coincide with whatever disinformation they're trying to spread).
I recently encountered them on Reddit, where people were trying to say the Australian bushfires were just caused by arsonists; these people are from the US and have no idea what's going on in Australia (how did they uncover evidence of arson before the local police?), there was absolutely no evidence for arson, and it didn't explain why it spread so far & rapidly.
Please make sure you get your information from credible sources; as in, sources without a vested interest in industries that have a long history in disinformation campaigns.
Inherently, nothing, but allegations do not equal guilt. However in Assange's case, the allegation was taken as fact before the evidence was investigated. Upon investigation of these allegations the case was dropped because the evidence was not strong enough. Witnesses memories had faded after 10 years.
Assange being in the Ecuadorian embassy would not have prevented Sweden from building a case and charging him.
The UK urged Swedish prosecutors not to question Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy,[1] though Swedish prosecutors eventually did so. When Swedish prosecutors wanted to drop the investigation, British officials urged them to continue it:[2]
> Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!
But immediately after the US began extradition hearings against Assange in London, and there was a debate over whether to give the Swedish or American request priority, Sweden dropped the case.
Just to top it off, Swedish prosecutors altered witness testimony[3] and UK prosecutors deleted emails relating to the case.[1]
The investigation was dropped because it had already served its purpose.
"Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, "I don't really worry about invasions of privacy because I don't have anything to hide." I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, "Here's my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide." Not a single person has taken me up on that offer."
Glenn Greenwald in Why privacy matters - TED Talk
"[...] But saying that you don't need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have, to hide anything -- including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You're assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations, and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences."
Edward Snowden in Permanent Record
People have the right to use their money how they want without any outside interference.
If people want to play with their money on BitMex they should be able to instead of using VPN's to disguise themselves and do it illegally.
But apparently you are only permitted to spend your USD in the manner approved by the U.S. Gov and once the US goes to a digital currency, this whole law enforcement will be 1000x easier as every single transaction can be traced and immediately frozen.
This could be turned into a really great security tool, akin to a deadman switch, which upon activation and incorrect use, deletes the contents of the users home directory.
Example. In Mate Desktop. the default terminal is Mate Terminal. Upon installation of Suicide Linux, Mate Terminal could be modified to delete the users home, but provide no warning that it is running. For the user, they could use another terminal program for their daily needs without fear of deleting their home. In the event that their laptop is seized or stolen an attacker may use the default terminal program ie, Mate Terminal which would then upon the issue of any command delete the users home folder
In this case, just "rm" everything is far from enough, it needs to be a secure deletion. And the best way to implement secure deletion is using full disk encryption, this way, instead of wiping the entire disk, you just need to wipe the header, which contains its master key.
head -c 100000000 /dev/zero > /dev/sdX1; sync
An even better solution is interfacing the motherboard with a small microcontroller and storing the master key in hardware (and possibly with a key-split algorithm, so compromising the hardware doesn't reveal the key, but its destruction will kill the key), such as a battery-backed SRAM or a hardware crypto chip. The self-destruction command would be an I/O request to wipe the chip. Tamper-switches can be placed at strategic physical locations around the machine.
You can also write a deamon to monitor USB devices and trigger the self-destruction when an unknown device is detected, e.g. If your machine has been seized on-the-fly, the attacker is likely to plug an anti-screenlock USB mouse emulator, which triggers its self-destruction.
The tricky part is balancing the degree of security protection and the risk of data destruction from a false-positive trigger...
What's wrong with using FDE and entering the key manually on startup? You could then just shut down when you detect suspicious behavior and all is well or am I missing something?
It depends on your threat model. The OP mentions bobby traps and self-destruction, so I assume the threat model here is not a typical model in personal computing, but a different one, which is similar to Dread Pirate Roberts' threat model, as explained below.
Self destruction has two advantages, comparing to shutting down the system. First, once the encrypted master key in the header has been wiped, the data is gone, it's technically impossible to recover the data anymore (your passphrase is only the key to decrypt the master key in the header). On the other hand, revealing the passphrase under pressure is always a possibility. Second, when an attacker tries to seize your system, a possible strategy is seizing your system alive in a surprise attack, giving you no chance to shut the system down, and using an USB mouse emulator to defeat the screenlock.
And the reason of using a hardware-backed key storage, is to prevent the clone of the encryption header (which makes the self-destruction useless), and to ensure the destruction of the key is complete. In modern SSDs, due to wear levelling, there's no guarantee that the physical sector the header belongs to is actually erased.
No need for a booby trap. Some guy tried to do that akin from the scene in Mr.Robot with limited success using thermix. The only success was using a shape charge inside a desktop, but that is not possible on a laptop.
I like the idea of a USB dongle that is attached to the person which immediately locks the computer and erases the drive but the problem is that it takes time and law enforcement can just remove the battery to stop the erase (if battery is easily accessible).
Erasing the headers on an encrypted drive seems quick and effective and the way to proceed. But if the technique is to use a USB dongle then we should also be able to modify the source code of Suicide Linux to do the same with the modified default terminal.
> And law enforcement can just remove the battery to stop the erase
This is why full disk encryption should be used.
> Erasing the headers on an encrypted drive seems quick and effective and the way to proceed. But if the technique is to use a USB dongle then we should also be able to modify the source code of Suicide Linux to do the same with the modified default terminal.
Defense-in-depth, you add a bit of countermeasures at every level. For example, the USB self-destruction will immediately kick in (if the law enforcement decides to seize the computer alive, a mouse emulator is likely to be used immediately), erase the header, and halt the computer, even before anyone has a chance to perform any forensics. If the LE was able to take the computer to a lab, it's possible to do a live memory extraction via cold-boot attack while the computer in still running, for example.
Again, the tricky part is balancing the sensitivity of the self-destruction mechanism and the risk of data destruction from an accidental trigger... A possible workaround is adding an "armed" switch - the most sensitive tamper-detection code is only activated after the switch is flipped if the perceived risk is high, for example, before you take your laptop to a coffee shop.
Hook it up to your WiFi driver so if your AP every goes away so does the evidence of whatever you’re trying to hide. But plug the computer and AP into the same UPS.
:-(