News Assange accuses Facebook of being a US spying tool

So all those ads on Facebook saying i can meet 'mature women in Manchester' are actually subliminal messages from the CIA?

 

What I don't really get is why people get so uptight about the possibility of "the government" finding details of your personal life - unless you're doing something illegal then why are they going to care?

 

Being anonymous on the internet is exceptionally easy. First dont use third party services if you are worried about what they will do with your information. I don't thing that mark zuckerberg is holding a gun to your head and telling you that you must use facebook and post personally identifiable information. In regards to run of the mill internet usage, use free wifi hotspots that are not within view of any recording devices (directional antennas if necessary), onion routing with ssh, source spoofing (IP, mac, email headers, etc.) , and live cds to do any illegal internet activities. You might notice slight performance degradation but this is well documented in the IT community as the security productivity trade off.

And if you are exceptionally paranoid, grind up the utilized machine when you are done, split the grindings into several batches, and deposit the batches into six disparate road pavers that are parked for the night.

And if you are still worried that men and black suits will retrieve the grindings, rebuild your machine, retrace your encrypted traffic, and put you in jail for the rest of your life, just give me your full name and occupation. I will then use the evil all knowing internet to figure out where you live, snipe you from 2.74km away, and pay a random hobo to tea bag you corpse while i do inappropriate things to your significant other.

All in all, dont do anything illegal if you are worried about getting caught. Dont tell someone something if you dont what other people to find out about it. And the for love of all that is good in the world do not post either of the afore mentioned on the internet. I still have a hard time believing that people are that stupid.

 

I think this is an often used and rather short sighted argument. Everyone should come to their own conclusions about what is right or wrong, good or bad. Don't judge whether something is right or wrong based on whether it is against the law or not.

We take for granted in this country that for most of us, our government is roughly in line with what we consider acceptable behavior. Other countries are not so fortunate. It's for those countries that this is more relevant.

If you do something that yourself and many others consider to be morally acceptable but the government doesn't want you to do it for whatever reason, you won't want it on a database somewhere.

Likewise though, in this day and age, it should be perfectly obvious that you should never put any information online that you wouldn't want people to see.

I have little time for Julian Assange. He's attention grabbing publicity Hoover.

I happily use Facebook and Google with the knowledge that putting something online is potentially permanent. People need to relax but they also need to be more clued up.

 

This data from drivers-licenses and taxes etc are not the problem. The problematic thing here is the data about your social connections (i.e. friendlists) and your private life (i.e. things you search for at google, films you watch, games you play, etc.).

This private data shouldn't be freely available for the authorities nor any company.

If you use google as search-engine, youtube to watch videos, gmail for eMails and an Android-based smartphone, then google knows basically everthying about you... your friends, your hobbies, your likes and dislikes and even your geo-positions (yes Android-phones sent geodata to google and you can't prevent that, just like with the iPhone).

So, ask yourself if you really want all of that to be known to the companies and furthermore the authorities.

I for sure don't want all of them to know about my private life.

DINGDONG... Two men ringing your doorbell.

"Well Hello there Mr. X. We know about your little affair with this girl, and you sure don't want that information to be known by your wife or your kids now, do you?"

"If you help us to do some work, then we'll forget about this.... OK?"​

Oh, sure. You didn't any illegal there, only something that may be seen as immoral, but what do you do now?
Fact is, the government should'nt know all this private stuff about you, if you don't tell them personally.

 

All elective information which a person must willingly distribute by using the service/product. All of that can just be accessed by a subpoena, just like my home can be entered with a warrant. Basic features of the US legal system which I comply to by living here. You act like it's a shocking surprise.

The only new development here is Mr. Assange's claims that the process of using a subpoena to access that information is being bypassed.

 

By law any American company has to be able to share it's data with the CIA, which is partly why there's a controversy about the census.

 

Yep +1

 

go read Isaiah Berlin's 2 concepts of liberty

 

So you think Only the U.S. government has the ability to do this. Im sure there is some 13yo kid out there that has far surpassed what the government could ever hope to do. You may want to beware im sure that someone is tracking your post to this forum. Now they know your methods and programs you use, look how much information you gave away. Now your gonna have to constantly look over your shoulder, buy multiple disposable phones and use them on a rotating basis, check what ever mode of transportation you use for tracking devices (besides your phone), check your house for listening devices whenever you leave and when you wake up because they could have planted some while you were asleep. Just something for you to think about.

 

This doesn't concern me as I only post on facebook what I'm comfortable with the whole world potentially knowing. The NZ police however, have the right to install spy cameras in my home without warrant for up to 3 months. That is a total breach of privacy I don't believe any officials should have the right to.

 

... classic

 

omg what an attention whore...

seriously sure they maybe using it this way but Im sorry in the age of the internet you pretty much gave up your privacy when you started just living into todays technological world lol.

 

The who cares argument never works, blackmail guys. The less anyone knows about you, the less trouble you'll be in.

Imagine getting inquisitioned everywhere you went for every small thing you did.

 

EXACTLY what i was thinking. even if the US government was going to do something drastic like pull a random person out of a hat find terrible crimes that person committed (which probably wouldn't be posted on facebook to begin with), a massive % of the world uses facebook. if you aren't a US citizen, you're basically safe. even if you are a US citizen, the chances of you being the picked one is one of several hundred million.

i'm not sure why the government or companies like google even care about this kind of information. the only reasons i can think of is they might use it for statistical purposes or maybe the FBI uses it for finding out info about criminals.


y'know what i find really funny about all of this? the amount of people actually defending the US. thats not something i see every day. i can understand Assange's concerns but its not worth making a big fuss about.

 

Mr. AssOrange has made only one legitimate point in my opinion. If it's on the web, it can be monitored and collected. So what? There is vast amounts of data moving around every second. The entities analyzing that data look for specific elements because there isn't enough people in the world to analyze all of the world's internet traffic. They only go after people they believe have broken laws or pose a threat.

You are more likely to be hacked by someone trying to steal your identity than any gov't entity.

 

Greetings!

And this is news? Thought everybody knew this by now.

 

If I have something to hide I would use IRL person <> person communication. Not use phones or Internet at all.

Since my country is the NR 1 in mobile phone taps, currently 2.6m people are being monitored at this day even if the person thinks his phone is off he/she is being monitored. In fact our justice department is monitoring more mobile phone per month then the US in a whole year!

I am on Facebook, I share my info i want to share with relatives. Of course we all know anyone can access this information. Thats why you share your info in the first place isn't it? So anybody can see how you live your life if you share that much.

Anyhow... with Facebook I have found people I thought where dead or I would never see again. So its not all bad. Its a tool you and anybody else (including marketeers, governments etc) use to get information from.

 

he is correct.

 

Aha! Giving your age away there matey... The ads I get still say 'Meet young women in Portsmouth'!

LoL...