With a new administration coming into power, the Electronic Frontier Foundation feels that it’s time for a change (see what we did there). They’ve posted an agenda that covers fixing privacy issues that have come to the forefront in the last eight years. It involves repairing amendments that prevent corporations from being sued for warrantless wiretapping. They would also modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act so that it would cover modern technology. The heavily abused State Secrets Privilege needs reform as well. Their final issue is with REAL ID and datafarming that many state governments have already rejected. If even a bit of this gets fixed, we’ll be happy. In any case, it’ll be good to have a more tech focused administration that doesn’t need the internet explained to it in terms of dumptrucks and tubes.
[photo: Jake Appelbaum]
my mum just switched to att in terms of phone tv and net. a little privacy would be nice.=(
-hero
ya know i hate to burst peoples bubbles, but please rewrite or do something about the BS about wiretaps only being the past 8 years. anyone ever hear of fisa? reagan had it too, carter did it, H*ll it probably has been this way since before most of us were born, so instead of just spewing political BS out there attempting to say only one person has ever done this, at least do a bit of research.
also wtf does this have to do with hacking, get back to a hacking website and stay away from this BS please
i wonder if that picture is real. anyone know?
To be on the safe side, I just record my conversations onto my talkboy from 1992 and send it to the person I want to talk to.
it is real, a billboard modification group did it. I forget their name. they do all kinds of crap like that.
mat:
you’re thinking of the billboard liberation front (BLF). they claim to leave some good booze for the advertisers’ “cleanup crews” stashed on the billboards that they improve. all in the blf seems like good folks.
@ h_2_o …hack a day needs articles like this so people like yourself can become informed about amendments made to fisa, why they are problematic and how they can be changed.
i am perfectly aware of fisa and the patriot act. I would guess that most only know of patriot act stuff and therefore believe that this type of activity has only occurred within the time since 9/11, well it has been going on for a freaking long time. this was basically a political jab taken at the patriot act IMHO. I do not care if you are for or against the patriot act, putting BS like this up here and only telling about 1/100’th of it and just leaving it at that is garbage. also it has absolutely ZERO!!!!! to do with anything hacking. this site really has went to sh*t since they changed their format from hacking to mini engadget/gizmodo.
I quite enjoy the new format. Variety is after all, the spice of life. Further, a little bit of politics certainly spices up the comments section.
You comments show you are not really grasping the issue here. For example..”attempting to say only one person has ever done this”. What it actually says is “come to the forefront in the last eight years”.
The article doesn’t imply that there were not problems in the past. The article is saying that the new administration might be more receptive to addressing the EFF’s concerns.
Why would something like that make you so angry? Did your guy not win last week?
h_2_o is right, Bush was not the first to president to bend the laws of privacy… and he certainly won’t be the last. Our new President Elect just recently voted FOR extending FISA. Does that make him a bad person? Well, no… but it does show that he will pretty much continue the work/allowances of a long list of presidents who preceded him.
Oddly enough this is an article about the electronic frontier foundation and their wants and desires from the new leadership. I know that this first agenda was one of three so I might be beating them to the punch but:
Our new administration is entertaining the idea of re-instating/iniating a new Fairness Doctrine that would make the old one look like a joke. The new doctrine wants to extend to the internet, as well. Many of you will take this as a joke but it is not. That means if ‘they’ have issue with anything you say or write on the internet, ‘they’ have the authority to ‘edit’ it or take it down altogether.
That could make Hackaday a fun place… or maybe not. While Hackaday is mostly innocuous, I can assure you that many of the techniques that are discussed and linked to from this website would most likely be considered ethically sticky if/when the doctrine is enacted.
It isn’t all about politics and I make no apologies for Bush as he has certainly done some things that would make anyone scratch their head and say WTF?!!! But the least of your problems are behind you. That is not a comment about Obama, but rather a comment about the grass always being greener on the other side.
I say open the gates! if you can catch the signal it’s fair game. Likewise you’re welcome to protect it in any way you see fit. Drives me nuts that folks can refuse to understand something but still feel entitled to use it. If they don’t want to understand it they can pay for someone to protect it for them, and stop paying if that protection isn’t good enough.
but that goes for the gov too, be smart with your info, treat it like your virginity, the consequences are the same.
@h_2_0: Why is an article about electronic privacy on a website devoted to hacking? Are you serious? This is a very serious issue that will have a real effect on our lives, and as hackers it will probably affect us more than most.
I don’t understand why some people get all upset when the articles cover the political and other real world applications of hacking, rather than just posting schematics of the latest gadget. Schematics are great, but we have to keep in mind the real issues that are occurring in the world, what their effects on us are and how we can become active in shaping them.
ITT.: People losing the point.
True FISA has been around for a while, however the Shrub decided that he didn’t have to follow the rules of FISA. Anyway does the EFF, really believe the new administration really can bring change?I guess it couldn’t hurt to to try and give it chance to do so.
@rusty
I agree on ‘if you can catch the signal it’s fair game’ if it applies to the RF spectrum. I don’t think a ‘signal’ is fair game if you have to ‘hack’ a system to get access to the signal without a warrant, sort of like wiretapping phone lines, packet sniffing on any sort of wired newtwork, and similar.
Depending on how things go in the next few years, I could easily see everyday use of encryption increase dramatically.
Excuse me but didn’t I hear the new VP is known for being mad enthusiast about MORE assaults on online privacy rather than fixing the thing?
seriously… gtfo politics had. political opinions are like a^^holes: everyone has one and nobody wants to see yours.
nobody with half a wit thinks that anything will ‘improve’ under any administration in regards to privacy. privacy has been increasingly devalued with every administration since the Cold War broke out.