Because historically (and also legally) the bounds between what is private and public have been defined by what was plausible at the time, not by what was hypothetically possible.
We know live in a world were what used to a be a hypothetical dream (or science fiction novel) has now become the mundane. The law can either adapt (via judicial rulings), be changed by voters or become an absurd anachronism that's good for nothing but justifying invasive surveillance.
FWIW, it is legal to record wireless transmissions like cellphone calls. It is illegal to pass copies of those recordings on to other people. At least in the USA.
But you recording by your house isn't that interesting.
It is more complicated when you start talking about whether you should sell derivations of those recordings or someone aggregating the recordings made by many people.
It's not much more complicated. If I own properties throughout the city, and at each of those properties I record every license plate that drives by, I'm well within my rights to not only do that, but to aggregate that data and supply it to others if they ask.
It's the exact same thing as CCTV, fundamentally. How can you construct an argument that prevents me from doing this without preventing many things we already are okay with?
Legally, probably. Your final question sets a bad standard, present day societal approval is only weak evidence (that is, lots of heinous shit has been normative in various historical periods).
There is also the problem where you are talking about morality as if it is clear cut and all settled.
Anyway, I'm pretty well in favor of trying to find a meaningful definition of a space that exists between public and private, where shared space activities are not just a free for all. Mostly, because I think I would/will be more comfortable in shared spaces if I can expect that other people will mostly have some respect for my wish to not be followed around with technology.
(I would argue this space exists, it's plenty easy to irritate someone by 'getting in their face' in public. This is them expressing strident disapproval of your behavior...)
What is that argument, specifically? So far all I've heard is "this is wrong", not "this is wrong because of x".
The only point anyone's been able to make is that it could possibly be abused, but frankly, everything the government can do can be abused. You'll need more than "it could be abused" to argue against it.
I'm arguing that it makes me uncomfortable and that this discomfort will be widely shared. Go ahead and disagree that morality is something different than that if you want. You are also welcome to think that is weak sauce (but then go ahead and make a habit of making strangers uncomfortable in public and see how that serves you).
Recording and documenting where you go in no way hinders or interferes with your freedom of action, therefore I retain my right to freedom of action in doing so.
I don't have a right to go into a place where you have privacy. If you come out of a private place, or act in a way that is public, I have every right in the world to track you.
They were not "killing babies" they were "monetizing the vast network of uniformed African's who were potential baby killers". If they were technically doing anything wrong then Google wouldn't have partnered with them, because as Eric Schmidt said:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
If this malware is actually real then exploiting a large variety of different USB stacks (whether it's done via the the BIOS or OS stack) seems implausible. Maybe the flashed usb stick either:
1) Hides a bootloader on the devive that runs at reboot (assuming the BIOS allows it).
2) Pretends to be some kind of device (that most OS's have stock drivers for) that allows it to access main memory. Maybe it pretends to be a USB to firewire bridge (or something similar that gives it DMA).
Oh, it's just three or four USB stacks you have to mess up: 1) Windows (hey, they've found bugs exploitable in every Windows from 95/98 up to 7!), 2) Linux, 3/4) Phoenix/Award BIOS.
Assuming a government is the adversary (and we ALL know that the NSA sits on a very comprehensive list of exploits!), then this part is actually the easiest.
It's not just four stacks (or more, because the article also mentions Apple Macs and BSD) that you have to "mess up". You also have to mess them up in such a way that you can exploit them without a disk even being mounted. That four/five/six stacks are all exploitable to this extent because of buffer overruns (or similar) seems implausible.
3. Amazon gives preferential treatment to merchants using their auxiliary services. They already give preferential treatment to merchants using Amazon Fulfilment by writing off (at least some of) the bad merchant feedback caused by fulfilment issues. This effects customers (as well as merchants) because from the customers perspective failed fulfilment is the same no matter who does it.
The NSA shouldn't just be an attacker it should also provide defence. If one of their many contractors can leak details to the press for idealogical ends it's pretty safe to assume that much worse secrets have already been leaked to other nation states (China, Russia etc....) for financial gain.
I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that a lot of exploits the NSA has discovered and not revealed (because it thinks they are "secret") have actually been sold to other governments by it's own contractors. By not revealing these exploits to citizens they are actually leaving them open to attack by foreign governments. Large companies trying to defend against industrial espionage are probably most at risk.
> The NSA shouldn't just be an attacker it should also provide defence.
Uh, it actually does exactly that. That is the second major mission objective of NSA, is to ensure that the USA's own communications are secure. For example, the SHA-1 hash standard that underpins much of our cryptosystems was developed wholly by NSA as an alternative to MD5 (which was apparently even at the time thought to be weak at NSA).
However there's a difference between ensuring that the theoretical underpinnings of COMSEC are adequate and releasing 0-days. There will always be exploits in web browsers used by people, so NSA is not "helping the citizens" by releasing each and every one of those secretly to browser developers. They can effectively only hamstring them own mission goals by doing that.
If one of their many contractors can leak details to the press for idealogical ends it's pretty safe to assume that much worse secrets have already been leaked to other nation states (China, Russia etc....) for financial gain.
Especially as the agency in question appears to have no compartments or levels of access. I've been wondering how a comparatively junior contract worker could access so much information...
But Snowden was a sysadmin and successfully managed to digitally impersonate persons actually in the right compartments, among other things, in order to get access to the data he wanted.
I suppose it's better to say that NSA is too reliant on contracted systems administrators to handle what should be inherently governmental functions, and that they don't properly compartment sysadmin functions. But then again, is it even possible to completely protect a computer network against an insider sysadmin threat?
This is only tangentially related to the article but where I live there is a lot a wildlife, including many different species of birds. Some of these birds now sing songs that mimic common mobile phone ringtones. This is obviously not as bad as pollutants effecting birds behaviour but I think it's a great example of technology having strange, unintended consequences.
The justification is not the problem, it's the targets. People will give that excuse even when it's a blatant lie.
As far as I am aware, the discussion of 'fake geek girls' has mostly come from MRA-types that spend most of their time failing to see women as people. So any particular instance of 'fake geek girl' is almost certainly the commenter being an ass and wrong. But, again, as far as I am aware, there are no large groups going around being 'anti-hipster' in situations where it doesn't fit. So instances of being 'anti-hipster' are often accurate.
> Deconstructionism itself has some interesting ideas [...] like those pointing out that a work of art can mean two opposing things simultaneously. The problem, however, is that its sillier adherents—who are all over universities—take a misreading of Saussure Deconstruction to mean that nothing means anything [...]
Surely the point is that the meaning of the text is dependant on the context supplied by the reader. So for an analysis of a text to a mean something (rather than nothing) is must not only define the subset of readers it is confined too, but also offer some justification of why it assumes those readers supply a common context (and what that common context is).
Without this context an analysis of a text is a largely a polemic unless the analysis is so absurd (or dissident) that it becomes a satire. Assuming a wide definition of "a text" then the majority of the media have been effectively "saying nothing" for the last 30+ years and academia have been satirising them.
Because historically (and also legally) the bounds between what is private and public have been defined by what was plausible at the time, not by what was hypothetically possible.
We know live in a world were what used to a be a hypothetical dream (or science fiction novel) has now become the mundane. The law can either adapt (via judicial rulings), be changed by voters or become an absurd anachronism that's good for nothing but justifying invasive surveillance.