Thank you, NSA

David Meyer "thanks" the NSA for making us all insecure. His analysis is spot on, and it should outrage everyone who has tried to password protect anything on the Internet:

What is so jaw-droppingly idiotic about your actions is that you have not only subverted key elements of modern cryptography, but you have also appointed yourself as the guardian of the knowledge that the resulting vulnerabilities exist. And if your own security systems were up to the task, then those secrets wouldn’t be sitting in the offices of the New York Times and ProPublica. One must possess a Panglossian view on things to assume that Edward Snowden was the first person out of the many thousands in his position to make away with such material. He brought it to the public, and without that move there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have even known he took it. So who else has it? Bet you have no idea. So well done; you’ve probably put your own citizens at risk.

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Staying off NSA radar

At the U.K Guardian, Bruce Schneier offers five pieces strategies for staying off the NSA radar. Excellent article with real advice, including caveats Here are a few excerpts:

1) Hide in the network. 2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. 3) Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA – so it probably isn't. If you have something really important, use an air gap. 4) Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well. 5) Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations.

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Naomi Klein on being green

Naomi Klein on most "green" movements:

We now understand it’s about corporate partnerships. It’s not, “sue the bastards;” it’s, “work through corporate partnerships with the bastards.” There is no enemy anymore. More than that, it’s casting corporations as the solution, as the willing participants and part of this solution. That’s the model that has lasted to this day. . . .We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us. [I]t goes back to the elite roots of the movement, and the fact that when a lot of these conservation groups began there was kind of a noblesse oblige approach to conservation. It was about elites getting together and hiking and deciding to save nature. And then the elites changed. So if the environmental movement was going to decide to fight, they would have had to give up their elite status. And weren’t willing to give up their elite status. I think that’s a huge part of the reason why emissions are where they are. . . . where that really came to a head was over fracking. The head offices of the Sierra Club and the NRDC and the EDF all decided this was a “bridge fuel.” We’ve done the math and we’re going to come out in favor of this thing. And then they faced big pushbacks from their membership, most of all at the Sierra Club. And they all had to modify their position somewhat. It was the grassroots going, “Wait a minute, what kind of environmentalism is it that isn’t concerned about water, that isn’t concerned about industrialization of rural landscapes – what has environmentalism become?” And so we see this grassroots, place-based resistance in the movements against the Keystone XL pipeline and the Northern Gateway pipeline, the huge anti-fracking movement.

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Alan Grayson’s simple questions to the warmongers

Check out Alan Grayson's simple questions to Chuck Hagel and John Kerry at the 12:50 min mark on Democracy Now. Pathetic evasive answers by our "leaders." All while America rots at home from neglect. All while the big banks and the military industrial complex demonstrate that they own Congress. This is all so sad. I hope grade school teachers are telling the kids the truth about how their government operates. I completely support Representative Alan Grayson. The U.S. should stay out of Syria. I suspect that 50% of what we are hearing from the Obama Administration regarding Syria is untrue or unsubstantiated. Consider signing this Petition. Also, I'm not impressed with the Republican "peaceniks." If President Romney were leading the effort to attack Syria, 90% of them would be cheering him on. What we are witnessing is not rational. It is tribal.

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Taking God out of the pledge

I know that I'm in a minority in this country, but I don't see how making children say a pledge that affirms the existence of a supreme non-material being doesn't violate the separation clause.    The way I see it, if we starting making public school children starting affirming the existence of "god" today, the court's would immediately put a stop to it.  But since the phrase has been in place for more than 50 years, it's somehow OK. Here's the story that provokes my comment:

David Niose, former president of the American Humanist Association, and the plaintiffs' representative, opened his arguments Wednesday saying the pledge’s use of “under God” violates the Equal Rights Amendment of the Massachusetts Constitution and is an issue of discrimination.

Niose said the pledge’s repetitiveness in the public school system is indoctrinating and alienating to atheists.

“It validates believers as good patriots and it invalidates atheists as non-believers at best and unpatriotic at worst,” he said.

I agree entirely.

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