tad10
Elisha Dushku
- 5,533
- 599
The NSA watches you poop.
- Thread starter Beef Supreme_sl
- Start date
-
Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
You're a lazy shit.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has apologized for telling Congress earlier this year that the National Security Agency does not collect data on millions of Americans, a response he now says was "clearly erroneous."
ZyyzYzzy
RIP USA
- 25,295
- 48,789
Again, that is not collecting all internet traffic of every American citizen.
BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
- 14,778
- 2,670
On the contrary, someone that makes 100 posts a day on a message board while "working" screams government employee.
BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
- 14,778
- 2,670
Widen is not a moron. He's on the security council and he already knew the answer to the question. He was trying to let us/the rest of congress know about this shady stuff without going as far as Snowden did and ruining his own life.
FISA is a joke. They are a rubber stamp to whatever the NSA wants to do.
Yeah, Widen and a couple of others have been grumbling about this for years now but they had never been able to talk about it publicly.
fanaskin
Well known agitator
- 56,051
- 138,890
bitcoins to the rescue! is probably how that will evolve. they can't bully a money supply they can't control.
I was ready to be outraged over that, but it just seems to be the credit card companies continuing their denial of service to copyright infringing sites. Media companies have made arrangements with credit card processors to deny services to certain web sites, and it is very effective and shutting them down since there are so few credit card processors. Pirate friendly VPNs are the minority, so it makes sense to go after them. Of course more and more VPNs are allowing bitcoin, so fuck credit cards. Paying your peer to peer anonymizer with peer to peer money just seems fitting anyway.
The government outlawing VPNs would be a pretty big leap. More likely they would set up their own VPN companies or make arrangements with existing companies to rat you out.
Quineloe
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 6,978
- 4,464
Yes, the people who use VPN just to maintain privacy when surfing the web 100% legal are just collateral.
While bitcoins themselves are possibly (hopefully) going to stick around, much of their use is contingent on being able to buy (and sell) them. Not everyone can be a bitcoin miner after all.
That's where regulation kicks in. Anyone exchanging USD for Bitcoins is subject to federal regulation, as Dwolla and Mt. Gox found out the hard way (Paypal was already blocking Mt. Gox):Feds seize money from Dwolla account belonging to top Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox
I just checked Mt. Gox and they're resuming withdrawals again via a Japanese bank and other offshore partners. That's a very temporary fix, because the US is currently "promoting" an international agreement that will require all signatories to enforce US financial regulation. There is no way not to sign it, because signatories agree to limit trade with those who don't (effectively killing that country's exports industry). You wouldn't be able to withdraw your money to a bank in the Channel Islands and wire it to the US from there. Within a year or two, these Japanese banks will be subject to the same regulations as US banks and I don't know where Mt. Gox is going to go from there.
It seems to me that a requirement to keep records of all financial transactions and associate them with specific individuals is outright impossible with cryptocurrencies. It wouldn't surprise me if some regulatory agency decided that regulating bitcoins fell under its authority, in which case conducting transactions in the currency may be illegal.
Honestly, these laws are incredibly easy to pass because people focus on tax evasion. But there are much more important reasons to demand privacy in financial transactions and a few billion in lost tax revenues are a small price to pay. Much more revenue is lost to things like babysitting not being reported as self-employed income (subject to social security and medicaid taxes as well as regular income taxes).
But the same benefits that those pirating content seek out (anonymity) is also what others conscious of their privacy would seek out. A VPN that keeps logs of all your activities and hands them over to anyone asking them nicely is utterly useless.Torrid_sl said:
That'd really be the same way as trying to shut down Tor or TrueCrypt because they're used by people who trade child pornography. (I get that one is decentralized and one is open source, but you can always go after donations or operators of exit nodes.) Or bitcoins because of silk road.
VPNs that log use aren't useless; they are used to secure wifi connections and access sites like hulu from out of country and whatnot. Everybody should insist on using a no logging provider though, even if you don't pirate.
Gox's US account was frozen because they didn't register as a money transmitter under FinCen. I used dwolla to send money to CampBX and it worked fine. CampBX is registered.
I fully expect the government to continue the attacks on bitcoin however. California went after the Bitcoin Foundation for not registering as a transmitter, which is ridiculous. I assume that's why the value dropped $25 this week.
Gox's US account was frozen because they didn't register as a money transmitter under FinCen. I used dwolla to send money to CampBX and it worked fine. CampBX is registered.
I fully expect the government to continue the attacks on bitcoin however. California went after the Bitcoin Foundation for not registering as a transmitter, which is ridiculous. I assume that's why the value dropped $25 this week.
Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
- 46,854
- 100,136
I heard that south American leaders were trying to find out if there was anything they could do to protest or retaliate as a show of displeasure. Not sure what they could do other than just saying it.
